My Experience at ACM Data Mining Camp #DMcamp

My parents and I made plans to visit San Jose and Saratoga on my grandmother’s birthday, March 19, since that is where she grew up. I randomly saw someone tweet about the ACM Data Mining Camp unconference that happened to be the next day, March 20, only a couple of miles from our hotel in Santa Clara. This was an opportunity I could not pass up.

Upon arriving at eBay/PayPal’s “Town Hall” building, I was greeted by some very hyper people! Surrounding me were a lot of people my age and my interest. I finally felt like I was in my element. The organizers of the event also had a predetermined Twitter hashtag for the event #DMCAMP, and also set up a blog where people could add material and write comments about the sessions. I felt like a kid in a candy shop when I saw the proposed sessions for the breakout sessions.

Some of the proposed topics I found really interesting:

Anonamly Detection Natural Language Processing Collaborative Filtering and a Netflix Paper CPC Optimization for Events Data Mining Programming Tools Structured Tags Status of Mahout Machine Learning with Parallel Processors Sentiment Analysis Parallel R

About half of these actually […]

March 21st, 2010 | Category: Amazon EC2, Big Data, Data Mining, Databases and Datastores, Hadoop, Machine Learning, MapReduce, R, Statistics and Statistical Computing | 4 comments

Exact Complexity of Mergesort, and an R Regression Oddity

It’s nice to be back after a pretty crazy two weeks or so.

Let me start off by stating that this blog post is simply me pondering and may not be correct. Feel free to comment on inaccuracies or improvements!

In preparation for an exam and my natural tendencies to be masochistic, I am forcing myself to find the exact complexities of some sorting algorithms and I decided to start with a favorite – mergesort. Mergesort divides an array or linked list first into two halves (or close to it) and then recursively divides the successive lists into halves until it ends up with two lists containing 1 element each – the base case. The elements are then compared and switched so that they are in order, and form their own list.

At successive levels we compare the last element of the first sublist to the first element of the second sublist and merge them together to form another list. This process continues up the recursion tree until the entire original list is sorted. For a more comprehensive and precise description, see this article on mergesort.

Easy: The Worst Case

The worst case is easy as any CS […]

February 12th, 2010 | Category: Algorithms, R | 5 comments

Mining Tuition Data for US Colleges and Universities, and a Tangent

I wrote this script for the UCLA Statistical Consulting Center. I don’t know all of the specifics, but one of our faculty members has this idea that we can help our paper, The Daily Bruin, with their graphics or something to that effect. I don’t quite understand because our paper has never really been big on graphics for data, but apparently some undergraduates are going to work on this.

Anyway, we need datasets that are of interest to UCLA students so that our undergraduates can create cool graphics that will stun the readers. Some of the data we were considering:

parking data for one week; gate entries, to correlate with some other variable (weather was mentioned. ugh) Registrar study list/class schedule information for every student (anonymized of course) from Fall 2008. $50 for programmer time. (I could have done it quickly, for free! …if I worked in their office and it was legal, I mean.) 9/11 pager intercepts. tuition data for US colleges and universities over ten years.

The tuition data was presented in a bunch of tables presented on several pages. Unfortunately, the type of school is not reported. Due to this limitation, I had to execute separate queries […]

January 29th, 2010 | Category: Data Mining, R, Statistics and Statistical Computing, Web Mining | 2 comments

Advanced Graphics in R

Each quarter the UCLA Statistical Consulting Center hosts minicourses twice per week in R and LaTeX. Tonight was my turn to present.

I presented Advanced Graphics in R. This was the same presentation I gave at the LA R Users’ Group in August will a fellow consultant. She and I had trouble coming together to make one presentation, so we shared our outlines, and we deemed her outline was deemed “Intermediate Graphics in R” with some ggplot, and mine was deemed “Advanced.” It seems to work.

My slides are here, and the handout version is here. The corresponding code is here.

Topics include:

Customizing graphics with par parameters Using attributes of graphic objects Basic graphics devices Math typesetting for R graphics. an example of a movie (here, but there is some funkiness with it)

Many think that “advanced” graphics would be lattice or ggplot. We chose to address those packages in their own minicourses.

My advisor gave me some good advice on writing R code that fits well in Beamer slides and lstlisting:

use local variables and introduce them. don’t use function names as variable names (I violated this one here). […]

January 27th, 2010 | Category: R | 6 comments
« Newer Entries