Bluff Summer Internship 2018

This week has been very busy. The results section of my paper was due so the majority of my time was spent typing and editing and re-editing that. There were also some final decisions made about future steps. Instead of the NA cost strategy we've been following, we've decided to employ a delete strategy. In this strategy (which only works because there are only missing values at the end of the sequences) we will delete all missing values and be left with  sequences of different lengths. Then these mismatching sequences will be normalized and compared. This method gives faster and more accurate results than simply picking a substitution cost. Other than that change in beginning procedure, the rest of our methods have not changed. In addition to this decision, we have also decided on an ending age of 39 for our sequences. The new variables are finally fixed and we have a final dataset. We are ready to receive our final clustering results and have ensured they will be accurate wi...

Another good week! This week has been focused mostly on improving the plots for when they are included in my paper. They've been resized, reformatted, the titles fixed, colors changed, legend added and they are paper ready. In addition we have been investigating the best procedural steps to ensure optimal results. The NA cost debate from last week has been investigated further to include costs between 0 and 0.4 so we can decide definitively on a cost. Right now we have tentatively decided on 0.1 or 0.2 as that seems to be where the age cohorts disappear.  In addition to NA cost we are looking to include normalization as a step, which will hopefully allow us to include larger sequences without any age cohorts. We are trying 4 different normalization procedures including maxlength shown below. The titles are the oldest age included in the  sequence. The colors are once again the ages. Finally we have looked at internal clustering measures to determine the optimal number ...