I went to the weekly computing seminar yesterday, because it was on a statistical data mining tool that is being simultaneously used by physics experiments and marketing firms. The speaker is a physics professor, used to work for the PLUTO Collaboration, DELPHI, and now is variously associated with CDF and CMS. The company, Phi-T, is now totally private, and employs a couple dozen ex-physicists, or physicists, depending on how much of a purist you are. The software is proprietary and closed source, and the speaker was severely vague about what specific tools were actually used, but there is an interface in C++/ROOT/C#/Lisp already made, so its (supposedly) trivial to use, with a discounted academic licence.
So what is it? Basically, you have a vector of measureables, like detector channels, and some target, like say Resonance mass. Or Age, profession, #kids, and your target is “How much will this person cost us in Health Care in the next n years.” You then train the thing on your historic or simulated data, and it generates Bayesian posteriori distributions for new data. This is pretty common in neural computing literature, but this thing seems actually practical.
The only really fascinating thing is the generality of the thing, which was (supposedly) applied with minimal expert consultation on problems like car insurance premiums, to B_s mixing at CDF. Here’s a list of referred journal articles with their stamp. So whats inside? A neural network you say? No! The guy said in most applications they skip the neural net entirely and just use “Other” statistical methods. It’s clear that he was using some kind of input decorrelation like principle component analysis, but he wouldn’t say what specifically. He used a bunch of phrases that were cryptic to me like “zero layer network” to mean something other than a perceptron (I asked), and “zero iteration training” of a network. Maybe these things mean something to yall statters, but nothing to me. Anyways, the output of whatever was a discretized probability histogram that got splined together.
I’m unconvinced that the “default settings” he mentioned could schedule re-stocks for the largest book distributor in Germany AND find the X(3872) resonance, but what do I know? He also said that the companies own stock were controlled by this thing, but that selling it for this purpose is somehow illegal. Anyone know what he was talking about? Here’s a paper on it, by the speaker.
In the end, the talk was a sales-pitch/head-hunt, but if anyone out there needs to solve a highly nonlinear problem and has a cushy grant, go nuts.
Imaginary Potential 