Vincent Granville's Page

The interaction and cooperation between computers and the human brain is at a crossroad. There are some who believe that decision support systems should be completely automated. There are others who believe that there are many areas of business, technology, and science that have not been discovered yet, and, hence, only part of a decision support system can be automated. I subscribe to the latter proposition. Computer science is, at its core, an attempt to replicate the processing, reasoning, a… Continue

In the context of credit scoring, one tries to develop a predictive model using a regression formula such as Y = Σ w_i R_i, where Y is the logarithm of odds ratio (fraud vs. non fraud). In a different but related framework, we are dealing with a logistic regression where Y is binary, e.g. Y = 1 means fraudulent transaction, Y = 0 means non fraudulent. The variables R_i, also referred to as fraud… Continue

The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) Prizes. Winning the Netflix Prize improves our ability to connect people to the movies they love. www.netflixprize.com

From the company that brought you the C programming language comes Hancock, a C variant developed by AT&T researchers to mine gigabytes of the company's telephone and internet records for surveillance purposes. An AT&T research paper published in 2001 and unearthed today by Andrew Appel at Freedom to Tinker shows how the phone company uses Hancock-coded software to crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls "communities of inter… Continue

Aims and Scope Statistical Analysis and Data Mining addresses the broad area of data analysis, including data mining algorithms, statistical approaches, and practical applications. Topics include problems involving massive and complex datasets, solutions utilizing innovative data mining algorithms and/or novel statistical approaches, and the objective evaluation of analyses and solutions. Of special interest are articles that describe analytical techniques, and discuss their application to rea… Continue