What are you working on? June 2012

David_Gerard

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

This is the bimonthly 'What are you working On?' thread. Previous threads are here. So here's the question:

What are you working on?

Here are some guidelines:

Focus on projects that you have recently made progress on, not projects that you're thinking about doing but haven't started.
Why this project and not others? Mention reasons why you're doing the project and/or why others should contribute to your project (if applicable).
Talk about your goals for the project.
Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.
Link to your work if it's linkable.

I have some data here. The waiting time between two eruptions and the duration of the eruptions for the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA.

The question is of course, what is the underlying math, governing the lengths of these eruptions and pauses between them?

I have found a nice approximate algorithm. In fact, I have evolved it. In fact it is still evolving, I'll give it here, when the evolution will stop giving ever nicer results - in C programming language.

Using a high-powered black-box technique to regress a one-dimensional continuous outcome against a one-dimensional continuous predictor seems misguided.

If you want to characterize how well your evolutionary learning idea works, try it on data that you've generated, where you know the "underlying math". See if you can recover the program that generated the data or one that's equivalent to it. Or try it on really big, messy data where no one knows the right answer and see if you/it can do better than the obvious competitors like SVM, k-NN, CART, et... (read more)

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What are you working on? June 2012

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What are you working on? June 2012

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