[OT] What field (if any) of math am I looking for?
Subject: [OT] What field (if any) of math am I looking for?
From: Richard Owlett
Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 07:18:41 -0500
Dan Hatton wrote:
> On Mon, 26 May 2008, Richard Owlett wrote:
>
>
>>In an engineering group, there was a question of comparing the "shape"
>>of plots of observed data. The discussion got tangled in "where did data
>>come from" rather than whether or not one short sequence (tens of
>>points) in some sense had the same "shape" as another sequence.
>>
>>I attempted to recast the problem
>>
>>Given pairings of datasets ( ALPHA BETA ), ( BETA GAMMA) etc
>>is there a measure ( OMEGA(x,y) ) such that
>>
>>OMEGA(ALPHA(i), ALPHA(j)) always greater than OMEGA(ALPHA(i), BETA(k))
>
>
> Substitute "always" for "with some probability that we can estimate",
> and you might be looking for "classifiers" or "model comparison". In
> which case, there's some relevant material in
>
> D. J. C. MacKay. Information theory, inference, and learning
> algorithms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Sep. 2003. URL:
> <http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.pdf>;.
>
> Pulling this back on topic, a quick scan of the Maxima manual suggests
> the lsquares and stats packages are relevant.
>
Thank you, and to Stavros Macrakis who replied off list.
You both have have given me the search terms I needed to start digging.