On Tuesday the paper Computer activity learning from system call time series that Curt and I wrote was posted to the Arxiv. It explains how we used machine learning to create a minute-by-minute description of what is happening on a computer.…

The n-cube playground As a playground to understand the curse of dimensionality we spread 20,000 points throughout a 10-dimensional cube of side 2. Each coordinate of a point is independently chosen from a uniform random distribution ranging from -1 to 1.…

The curse of dimensionality made its print appearance in Richard Bellman’s 1957 book Dynamic programming. It was an outcry over the impossibilities of dealing with functions of many variables when a computer with a million bytes of memory seemed beyond imagination.…

When collecting data for analysis strange things happen that make their way into the dataset. Sometimes those strange things are mistakes and we try to get rid of them, other times, they really are part of the data and we have to deal with them.…