Learning Tree published my article on using Principal Component Analysis to reduce the dimensionality of data. … [Read more...]
Worst passwords of 2015
SplashData, a purveyor of password managers, has produced its annual list of the year's worst passwords. The top ten are 123456 password 12345 12345678 qwerty 123456789 1234 baseball dragon football I guess we should all be shocked at how poor these passwords are. However, there's no breakdown of which sites these passwords came from. If they are all from bank accounts then, yes---OMG! … [Read more...]
Don’t trust the polls
2016 is the year of the US presidential election. Prepare to be besieged by polls. The embarrassment of the 2015 UK parliamentary election predictions is a distant memory. We get to start over. However, Mona Chalabi reminds us, via the Guardian's Datablog, of the challenges facing pollsters. She lists five: The media are fallible. They follow fashion and make the news. Journalists are fallible. … [Read more...]
Election polling errors blamed on bias
A report has concluded that the spectacular failure of pollsters to predict the result of the 2015 UK Parliamentary elections was largely due to systematic over-representation of Labour voters and under-representation of Conservative voters The report, compiled by a panel of academics and statisticians, was commissioned by the polling industry to determine why they had predicted a … [Read more...]
Data science with Microsoft
Jan Mulkens recently published an article on Microsoft's recent rush to enhance it's data science offering. And, as he illustrates, they have been very busy this year. He highlights a number of their flagship data science initiatives. Azure Machine Learning Power BI Cortana Analytics Suite Acquisition of Datazen & Revolution Analytics Integration of R in SQL Server Other significant data … [Read more...]