At last weekend’s Hack Ta Ville event here in Montreal, I joined up with some talented urban planners and web devs to realize Vélobstacles. The idea of the project is to crowd source information on cycling conditions around the city. As with any crowd sourcing project, we were faced with the problem of seeding the 
This image comes from the cover of Preliminary Papers of the Second International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (1989). Someone abandoned it in the lobby of my building at school. Whatever for, I’ll never know. I just love the idea of machine learning/AI/Statistics evoking a robot hand drawing a best fit line through some 
As an invasion biologist, the process of spatial spread is at the heart of what I do. When I came across this dataset of Walmart store openings since 1962 I couldn’t help but see it as an invasion front which looks a lot like a biological invasion or (albeit slow) epidemic. The video shows monthly 
A while ago I wrote this post with some R code to visualize the updating of a beta distribution as the outcome of Bernoulli trials are observed. The code provided a single plot of this process, with all the curves overlayed on top of one another. Then John Myles White (co-author of Machine Learning for 
If you haven’t yet discovered the competitive machine learning site kaggle.com, please do so now. I’ll wait. Great – so, you checked it out, fell in love and have made it back. I recently downloaded the data for the getting started competition. It consists of 42000 labelled images (28×28) of hand written digits 0-9. The 
In his 2004 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Steven Peck argues: Simulation models can be used to mimic complex systems, but unlike nature, can be manipulated in ways that would be impossible, too costly or unethical to do in natural systems. Simulation can add to theory development and testing, can offer hypotheses about the 
In my morning attempt to read the whole internet before beginning work, I came across a program on the BBC website which allows you to see which Olympic athletes are your body doubles. Or rather, which athletes share your height and weight, and therefore your body mass index. Being a Canadian, I exist in an 
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Chaos. Hectic, seemingly unpredictable, complex dynamics. In a word: fun. I usually stick to the warm and fuzzy world of stochasticity and probability distributions, but this post will be (almost) entirely devoid of randomness. While chaotic dynamics are entirely deterministic, their sensitivity to initial conditions can trick the observer into seeing iid. In ecology, chaotic 
Thursday, June 28th, 2012 19h. <– new evening time! Tomson House: 650 McTavish, H3A 1Y2, Montréal, QC <– new social setting! guRu: Ramnath Vaidyanathan (McGill University) Ramnath Vaidyanathan will introduce the group to slidify, his brand new R package. From the slidify website: “The objective of slidify is to make it easy to create reproducible 
Why settle for just one realisation of this year’s UEFA Euro when you can let the tournament play out 10,000 times in silico? Since I already had some code lying around from my submission to the Kaggle hosted 2010 Take on the Quants challenge, I figured I’d recycle it for the Euro this year. The 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
