ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

The purpose of this experiment is to see whether an explorative data mining program could recognize degree of similarities in about 60 species of animals, from honeybees to lions, to starfish, parrots, etc. The software program used is from  www.viscovery.net  . Some uses of this program are: (a) clustering of customer data according to their behaviour. (b) In gene data analytics to identify biomarkers for the diagnosis of diseases. (c) For fraud profiling and forensic applications. The data is from the University of California Irvine data archive (archive.ics.uci.edu/ml). The ‘properties’ (attributes) considered were: backbone, legs, fins, lungs, hair, feathers, eggs, milk, tail, domestic, aquatic, airborne, venomous, predator.  Presence of an attribute is denoted by 1, and absence by 0, except for Legs, where it has a numerical value of: 2,4,6,8 legs. The tool was made to learn the attributes of all the animals and group them into clusters, each cluste...

One of the most diverse of families in the Animal Kingdom is the family of Cichlids fishes. There are estimated to be 2600 species of Cichlids, and each year more are discovered.Each of the narrow , deep lakes of the African Rift Valley (lakes Malawi, Tanganyika and Nyasa),contain more than a thousand species of Cichlids. There are also Cichlids in South America and a few species in Asia.   Through ev olutionary adaptation, each species carves out a niche for itself in the micro-ecosystem that it occupies.. Thus species of many shapes, colors, kinds of diet and mating behavior have evolved to suit the characteristics of each niche in the ecosystem. Fast-flowing/slow-flowing waters, acidic,alkaline, brackish, environments with many predators, low-oxygen etc there will be a Cichlid that is able to thrive. You might find it interesting to know that the Discus and the Angel Fish despite their very different shapes, belong to the Cichlid family. So is the common Tilapia t...