= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
IlyaShpitser comments on Introducing Familiar, a quantified reasoning assistant (feedback sought!) - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (40)
Hi.
Based on your github description: is this just a program that does parameter and structure learning in graphical models? Why not simply use one of the large set of existing programs that do this?
All the ones I've found so far have some combination of the following traits:
I think a program that avoids all of those things simultaneously will be able to fill a useful niche for many people. If you know of a free program that an intelligent layperson could learn to use with minimal effort, and that's made to collect data from a variety of existing Quantified Self apps and devices (or at least be easily amenable to such extension), I'll happily stop development and use that instead.
There are lots of open source research programs for graphical model stuff.
I think it is a better (if less glamorous) use of time to put a user friendly UI around one of these, and write glue code to use data formats you want than to re-implement the statistical guts from scratch. Academics have lots of incentive to have very smart "guts," but not a lot of incentive to interoperate with data sources and have user friendly UIs.
That seems extremely sane in retrospect; thankfully I haven't done very much work on the statistics side, and sunk costs are therefore comfortably low if I were to take that path. I'm also not worried about glamour at all in that case, since I'm the one doing the work of "make it something people will actually want to use and that is useful". There are indeed many of them--do you have a specific recommendation?
Hello, thanks for your reply.
I am mostly on the supply side of the aforementioned "statistical guts," so I am not sure I am the best person to ask. The two big questions (which I am sure are obvious to you as well) are (a) language used, and (b) what functionality do you want in the "guts"? For instance Kevin Murphy's BNT has a lot of stuff, but is written in Matlab and not R. The fact that lots of people have to pay for Matlab will hinder adoption. SAMIAM is not open source, I think.
@jamesf - which one of the programs will you be picking?
I'm researching that right now. Recommendations are welcome.