Analytics

I have an opening to take on more hours of client work beginning in mid-September.  Please feel free to contact me if you're looking for support in forecasting, automation, quantitative design, social network analysis---or anything I've written about here.

There is a fantastic analysis using the Lending Club datastore to investigate and visualize the marketplace Lending Club blogged over at Dataspora.  As I've mentioned before, I'm intrigued with P2P finance as an emerging industry, and if we're lucky, as an alternative asset class.  As an emerging industry, we're seeing a number of different competitors rapidly enter and exit the industry, and regulations that fit it like a hand-me-down sweater, a little too big, clearly made for the problems of a different industry: the financial older brother they most resemble, but are distinct from.

I've posted before about Google correlate in Google Correlate for fun and profit. It's a fantastic platform, but I have not yet discovered any practical use cases for it.  This is still the case, but after experimenting with it more, I now have a better idea of what they would need to do (and why they can't do it), to make it more useful.

There was a New York Times Science article yesterday on an offering from Stanford Engineering. In the spirit of the Khan Academy, which I greatly admire, an artificial intelligence course is being offered free and online, taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. There are currently about 63,000 registrants.

The main course information is here:
http://www.ai-class.com/

...well, if you find the "profit" application, let me know.

Google labs has a new product called Google Correlate.  You can read the product's introductory description here (in comic book form).  The service takes any time-based data series you give it and matches the Google search queries that have the highest correlation with your series, then does you the additional favor of plotting it on a map---very cool.