Bluff Summer Internship 2018

The PCA method from week 5 was modified and implemented to select features to be used for the remainder of the project. Five prominent features are now attributed to each subset. After selecting the features, the data was normalized using MinMaxScaler. Each subset was grouped into 30-minute windows for clustering. I used k-means on each window separately and created lists of centroid locations and group labels. With the help of Alina, I was able to find and list the degree changes of centroids between windows. Alex Sim, a mentor of mine in the SDM group, published several papers using this idea of degree change. The degree change is defined as the sum of the distances each centroid moves from one window to another. The following visual help demonstrate the proposed formula. The previous window is on the left and the current window is on the right. The diagonal black line segments show the distance each centroid has moved from the previous window to the current window. Consid...

With Alina back the ride to San Francisco was much smoother. We arrived there early Saturday morning close enough to China town to walk.We wondered around  until we finally decided on another small dim sum place. The place was very good and I seem to be no better at ordering since the last time. I ended up with a few things I had no clue what they were, but they were all good. After we finished eating we walked toward Pier 39 and the East Bay Aquarium. We decided to go to the Aquarium first. We started at 2 amazing tunnel tanks. My favorite was the second: a tank full of sharks. My mom loves sharks, so seeing them reminds me of her. I could have stood looking at them for hours, but there was plenty more to see. We went up a floor to the tanks with bat rays and small sharks you can touch. They were going to feed them soon, so we decided to stick around. While we waited, one bat ray took special interest in me, splashing me several times and soaking my shoes (but it was ok because...

This weekend Tyler and I were left on our own as Alina went home to spend the holidays with her family. We decided to treat this like a catchup weekend. Both of us only spent one day with Alina the first weekend we were here. If you remember I got to walk the Golden Gate Bridge and Tyler hiked to the peak of Inspiration point in Berkeley. So this weekend we would walk the bridge for Tyler Saturday and hike in Berkeley Sunday. There was also a weekly dance event I was interested in trying. It's called Lindy on Sproul and its a meeting of some local swing dancers with lessons and a social dance hour.  It was Saturday morning so Tyler very graciously agreed to leave for Fransisco later in the day so I could attend this event. I'm so glad I went. It was amazing. During the school year I danced at least once a week at Cedar's swing night, but I haven't danced since school let out. It was incredible to be able to dance again and learn a more west coast style in the process. ...

On this weekend I spent a small portion of Saturday in San Francisco taking my first up-close look at the Golden Gate Bridge. Alex and I, without Alina this time, began by taking a very long, unplanned detour South toward Fremont. I didn't realize we had gotten on a Bart sub that required a transfer to get to San Francisco. I was too busy looking for things to do in San Francisco to realize we weren't even hitting the right stations. Luckily, Alex managed to see that we weren't where we thought we were going and correctly directed us to get off and start heading back towards the transfer station. After the delay and upon waiting for a bus to take us to the bridge, we stopped by a nearby bakery/ sandwich shop for lunch. The bus took us to the other side of the bridge so we could walk back over. All I can really say was that it was big, though it wasn't as long as I thought it would be. What amazes me is that it was originally constructed out of beams of wood. ...

The plots work! It took all of Monday and most of Tuesday, but we finally found the problems in the code. Ironically, as we were trying to fix the plots they progressed from not clustering at all to all clustering finally to what they should look like. Once those problems were figured out we were able to do slight alterations and use different information until we were left with a robust graphical interpretation of the optimal NA cost. Here are a couple of the graphs: These 2 are colored by age group. For example the read in the top plot are the people born before 1983 and the green those born after. So the clusters tell us that the age is playing a significant role in the placement of individuals and thus are creating clusters. Because age is our alignment variable, different age groups are going to have a different level of missing values and thus the higher cost for replacing missing values will affect the younger survey participants much more than the older part...