Insight. Applied.
Sad to hear that game theory pioneer and Nobel Laureate John Nash was killed yesterday in a car accident.
Game theory is used to study interactive decision-making. Nash made fundamental contributions to the field, leading to him being awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994.
SchoolBenchmarker, developed by us and Prism Decision Systems for the New York State Center for Rural Schools, has just been relaunched with the latest schools data.
The mobile web application allows school managers to compare their schools against high-performing peers.
The core technology could be used to compare any kind of operating units, such as healthcare providers or retail branches.
FiveThirtyEight is publishing forecasts for the 2015 UK general election.
The site was founded by Nate Silver who made a name for himself creating models that were successful in forecasting the results of recent US elections.
Current predictions are for even closer parity between the Conservatives and Labour, with the SNP comfortably in third place (but not fully in control of the balance of power).
Talking Machines is a new machine learning podcast hosted by journalist Katherine Gorman and Havard computer science professor Ryan Adams. It’s described as:
[…] your window into the world of machine learning. Your hosts […] bring you clear conversations with experts in the field, insightful discussions of industry news, and useful answers to your questions. Machine learning is changing the questions we can ask of the world around us, here we explore how to ask the best questions and what to do with the answers.
The first episode lays the ground for what will follow in the remainder of the season.
Rob Hyndman and Shu Fan have released an R package for electricity demand forecasting. It’s based on their paper “Density forecasting for long-term peak electricity demand”, published in 2010.
From the project’s Github page:
The package requires the following data as input:
– half-hourly/hourly electricity demands
– half-hourly/hourly temperatures at one or two locations
– seasonal demographical and economical data
– public holiday dataThe formats of the required data are described in the help files.