new OpenOpt Suite release 0.50

Hi all,
I'm glad to inform you about new OpenOpt Suite release 0.50 (2013-June-15):

    * interalg (solver with specifiable accuracy) now works many times (sometimes orders) faster on (possibly multidimensional) integration problems (IP) and on some optimization problems
    * Add modeling dense (MI)(QC)QP in FuncDesigner (alpha-version, rendering may work slowly yet)
    * Bugfix for cplex wrapper
    * Some improvements for FuncDesigner interval analysis (and thus interalg)
    * Add FuncDesigner interval analysis for tan in range(-pi/2,pi/2)
    * Some other bugfixes and improvements
    * (Proprietary) FuncDesigner stochastic addon now is available as standalone pyc-file, became available for Python3 as well

Regards, Dmitrey.

OpenOpt Suite release 0.45

I'm glad to inform you about new OpenOpt Suite release 0.45 (2013-March-15):
  * Essential improvements for FuncDesigner interval analysis (thus affect interalg)
  * Temporary walkaround for a serious bug in FuncDesigner automatic differentiation kernel due to a bug in some versions of Python or NumPy, may affect optimization problems, including (MI)LP, (MI)NLP, TSP etc
  * Some other minor bugfixes and improvements

Google Statistician uses R and other programming tools

A great interview on the Simply Statistics blog with Google's Nick Chamandy, Phd in Statistics.  Explains that he mainly uses R among other tools to perform his work at Google.  Also of note is the active data science community within Google that uses R as well as some other interesting tools.  Note that they use a lot of data at Google, understandably, and that R usually can not handle the size.  They do a lot of ad hoc reduction of the data with tools like map reduce, Go, and even an R API.  I would love to see how they use the R API to assimilate data.

An interesting insight from the interview is the amount of programming done by the Statisticians.  It seems the culture at Google is to foster autonomy and let the modelers develop their own data manipulation from the raw data.  This requires a broader skillset beyond the statistical analysis tools.

I've found in my work that having knowledge in many tools like R,  CPLEX, and GLPK allows me to be a more effective in my work.  Recently I've been learning a lot of SQL using the PostgreSQL platform.  The tools of SQL combined with statistical tools like R make for a very strong combination.  I'm very agile in my work and can do a varied number of decision analysis.

OpenOpt Suite release 0.43

I'm glad to inform you about new OpenOpt release 0.43 (2012-Dec-15):

    * interalg now can solve SNLE in 2nd mode (parameter dataHandling = "raw", before - only "sorted")
    * Many other improvements for interalg
    * Some improvements for FuncDesigner kernel
    * FuncDesigner ODE now has 3 arguments instead of 4 (backward incompatibility!), e.g. {t: np.linspace(0,1,100)} or mere np.linspace(0,1,100) if your ODE right side is time-independend
    * FuncDesigner stochastic addon  now can handle some problems with gradient-based NLP / NSP solvers
    * Many minor improvements and some bugfixes

Visit  openopt.org  for more details.

Regards, D.

Day in the life of a Data Scientist

A great read from the Decomposition blog about the day in the life of a Data Scientist.  I consider myself a Data Scientist by any other name.  The blog article by Sean does a great job of breaking down the essence of making better decisions for the organization you may be involved.

I've always thought asking good questions is the start of good analysis.  The organizations basically doesn't know what it doesn't know.  A good Data Scientist will be a like a sleuth looking for clues.  In all honesty that may be the most fun about being a Data Scientist.

OpenOpt Suite release 0.42

Hi all,

I'm glad to inform you about new OpenOpt Suite release 0.42 (2012-Sept-15), fa free Python-written cross-platform software with primal focus on numerical optimization. Main changes:

*    Some improvements for solver interalg, including handling of categorical variables
*    Some parameters for solver gsubg
*    Speedup objective function for de and pswarm on FuncDesigner models
*    New global (GLP) solver: asa (adaptive simulated annealing)
*    Some new classes for network problems: TSP (traveling salesman problem), STAB (maximum graph stable set)], MCP (maximum clique problem)
*    Improvements for FD XOR (and now it can handle many inputs)
*    Solver de has parameter "seed", also, now it works with PyPy
*    Function sign now is available in FuncDesigner
*    FuncDesigner interval analysis (and thus solver interalg) now can handle non-monotone splines of 1st order
*    FuncDesigner now can handle parameter fixedVars as Python dict
*    Now scipy InterpolatedUnivariateSpline is used in FuncDesigner interpolator() instead of UnivariateSpline. This creates backward incompatibility - you cannot pass smoothing parameter (s) to interpolator no longer.
*    SpaceFuncs: add Point weight, Disk, Ball and method contains(), bugfix for importing Sphere, some new examples
*    Some improvements (essential speedup, new parameter interpolate for P()) for our (currently commercial) FuncDesigner Stochastic Programming addon
*    Some bugfixes

In our website ( http://openopt.org ) you could vote for most required OpenOpt Suite development direction(s) (poll has been renewed, previous results are here).

Regards, D.

Upgrade your skill sets with free courses

We are in the midst of the Insight Age.  We have moved beyond capturing data and are now processing information.  Properly processing the large amounts of data requires knowlege and skill sets.  Fortunately there are many ways to develop those skills.

Class Central is a website that provides a complete list of free online courses from some of the most established and prestigious universities in the world.  Websites like these are helping to make the world smaller by providing free and accessible learning resources.

I am a big fan of open courseware.  There are plenty of other places to look for open coureses.  The Open Courseware Consortium is a useful resource.  A good metasearch site like OpenCourseWare Finder is valuable as well.