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...

I am still reading the three books above, but have already begun to wonder at the marvel that is Nature. Like all scientific endeavors, Artificial Intelligence is constantly evolving. But I can see that the direction for the future is towards 'softer' systems that emulate the biological neural systems. Less of the machine-based algorithms that are faster but more brittle; towards systems which closer emulate Nature. Nature's ways are sometimes strange. Many redundancies (e.g. junk DNA), meandering and seemingly aimless moves. But eventually a more robust solution. The workings of AI's current Genetic Algorithms that are used for Optimization are more of a Mendelian process of selective breeding rather than natural evolution. Nature's evolution is an open process. There is no predetermined goal. Each generation adapts to whatever its environment throws up, and the fitness of a generation is only specific to fitness for the environment of that moment. Genetic Algor...

Since I first wrote on this subject in my Facebook, (see image of text of the FB post above), I have discovered yet another classic: Neural, Novel and Hybrid Algorithms for Time Series prediction~ by Timothy Masters [Wiley, 1995]. It's eighteen years since the book was first published. But the topics covered (especially on data pre-processing, scaling and transformations) are still as important. I read each page with the new advantage of perspectives and practical experience gained on this subject these past eighteen years. Old words took on a new significance, a deeper meaning, and sometimes a different meaning. I begin to see the advantages of of hybrid models that combine Neural Nets, Genetic Algorithms, Statistics and Digital Signal Processing. Here are the Contents of this book: 1. Preprocessing 2. Subduing Seasonal Components 3. Frequency-Domain Techniques I 4. Frequency-Domain Techniques II 5. Wavelet and QMF Features 6. Box-Jenkin ARMA Models 6. Differ...

THE FLOCKING BEHAVIOR OF BIRDS, FISH, INSECTS AND EVEN HUMANS. CGA (computer graphics animation) of how flocks of birds, fish, or humans in a crowd move are very realistic. But they follow simple rules discovered by Craig Reynolds in 1986 i n a simulation of digital creatures he called Boids. In the 1992 film Batman Returns the swarms of computer- modeled bats and penguins used this algorithm. Crowds of people behave in the same way if you observe them going leaving the MRT, or shoving to get ahead  towards some object. The simple rules of 'flocking' from which emerge the the fascinating patterns of swarms are (1) keep a certain average distance between your nearest flockmates (avoid collision) (2) Move towards the average position (center) of the flock/school/crowd (3) Move in the average direction of the flock/school/crowd. The next time you are in a crowd see if you have unconsciously followed these rules. Flocking is a stable phenomenon but if just one of the flock br...

FAQ ON HIGH FREQUENCY ALGORITHMIC TRADING (HFAT) IN FINANCIAL MARKETS Q1.Why must I know more about HFAT? Because if you don't, you will be ignoring a major revolution that is going on in the financial markets and affects whole economies as well as individuals like you. HFAT is growing rapidly in market volume share all over the world. In America it now accounts for > 53% of all trades, in Europe 28%, Asia 18%. By asset class it accounts for 65 % of equity trades, 50 % of f utures, 40 % of options, 25 % of forex and 20 % of fixed income instruments. Q2.What does Algorithmic mean.? Algorithmic simply means a set of instructions/rules. In our IT age it means having a software program that executes these instructions automatically. Algorithmc does not automatically equate with high frequency. Many fundamentals-based institutional traders also use algorithms merely to automate their trades. These could be stop-loss Algos, Algos that break up big blocks of buy/sell so that they won...

To all the ardent Creationists and Theists who keep writing to me re the posts on 'God' on this Blog. Thanks, but no thanks. I respect your need for religion but there are many like me who don't need it. So leave us alone. Here is a re-post from my Facebook: LIFE IS A CLASS 4 CELLULAR AUTOMATA To the Creationists and Theists who inhabit my Facebook, I understand that Religion is ultimately a quantum leap of faith and it is suitable for some people. But I am impressed by my correspondence with a pastor in Georgia, USA-who did use Science to explore alternative views of the origin of the Universe and Life before taking that leap of faith. I applaud him for that though I disagree with his conclusion. He has read Richard Dawkin's many books, Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, dabbled with Artificial Intelligence, and played with Cellular Automata such as Conway's Game Of Life (available as an iOS app). Cellular Automata are a simulation of Life played ou...