Data Mining, Down Under

Australian Data Mining conference (AusDM09) will be held in Melbourne next December and Dr Phil Brierley of Tiberius Data Mining has put out the call for proposals for an analytic challenge to accompany the conference.  Competitions are quite popular in data mining circles and provide a good training ground for new practitioners to get access [...]

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Sebastian Thrun of Stanford Racing gives a great a talk on what it took build an autonomous vehicle to win the DARPA Grand Challenge. There are lots of cool technical details on the use of machine learning to achieve this. You can watch it on Google Video here.

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For any machine learning based SPAM filters, such as the popular Bayesian methods, the key to success is the body of previously identified SPAM and HAM (valid emails) or training data. In order for the spammer to trick the filter, they must try to be more HAM-like. The way to beat this is by giving [...]

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The Data Mining Cup (DMC2006), has launched for 2006. This year the competition focuses on eBay auctions. The target is to predict for each new auction whether the actual sales revenue is higher than the average sales revenue of the product category.

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Start your engines, the DARPA Grand Challenge is on again only this time its an urban challenge! The last two competitions were to race an autonomous vehicle through a desert, with the 2005 winner, Standford, taking home a US$2 million prize. Stanford’s software in action: Input from GPS and many sensors feed the algorithms to [...]

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Dennis Forbes gives a fantastic analysis of one of the biggest databases on the Internet – the DNS records. His analysis includes insights into domain name length, personal and family name usage and other characteristics. For example, did you know that all 2- and 3-letter domains are taken? Dennis is planning a second part so [...]

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Each week, Google provides a taste of the top search queries, a site called Google Zeitgeist. At the end of each year, they compile a more comprehensive report of what people have been searching for. The 2005 Zeitgeist has been out since December and provides some interesting insights into online trends over past year. My [...]

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Here’s an interesting read. Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists takes a look at just how much information we can extract from publicly available data such as Amazon.com’s Wish List service. The wish list allows a user to bookmark items they would like either by coming back and purchase at a later date [...]

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