DNS on Home WiFi Like a lot of people, I have a home WiFi network, and I recently changed my Internet service provider. That required replacing my cable modem. Both the old and new modems provided a DHCP service that doled out local IP addresses to devices connecting to the home WiFi network. Both modems …
I thought I might use a few graphs to help explain an answer I posted on Quora recently. First, I’ll repeat the question here: In parametric optimization with unknown parameters, does a better estimator of the parameter always lead to better solutions to the actual problem? Here we’re trying to minimize f(x,θ) with respect to …
I’m following up on yesterday’s post, “Formatting in a Shiny App“. One of the features I added to my Shiny application was the ability to identify a point in a plot by hovering over it. Since I wanted to do this in several different plots, and did not want to reproduce the logic each time, …
I’ve been updating a Shiny (web-based interactive R) application, during the course of which I needed to make a couple of cosmetic fixes. Both proved to be oddly difficult. Extensive use of Google (I think I melted one of their cloud servers) eventually turned up enough clues to get both done. I’m going to record …
(Should I have spelled the last word in the title “ResouRces” or “resouRces”? The R community has a bit of a fascination about capitalizing the letter “r” as often as possible.) Anyway, getting down to business, I thought I’d post links to a few resources related to the R statistical language/system/ecology that I think may …
I recently picked up a pair of Bluetooth headphones (Mixcder ShareMe 7) for use with my laptop (which runs Linux Mint). Getting them to connect properly was a bit of an adventure. After I had things (mostly) sorted out, I decided to script the steps necessary to get them working so that I could just …
I’m working on an optimization problem (coding in Java) in which, should various celestial bodies align the wrong way, I may need to compute the rank of a real matrix and, if it’s less than full rank, a basis for its kernel. (Actually, I could get by with just one nonzero vector in the kernel, …
I just read a nice post by Jean-François Puget, suitable for readers not terribly familiar with the subject, on overfitting in machine learning. I was going to leave a comment mentioning a couple of things, and then decided that with minimal padding I could make it long enough to be a blog post. I agree …
I’m recapping here an answer to a modeling question that I just posted on a help forum. (Since it will now appear in two different places, let’s hope it’s correct!) The original poster (OP) was working on a routing model, in which vehicles (for which I will use and if needed as indices) are assigned …
Technology is continuously evolving, and for the most part that’s good. Every now and then, though, the evolution starts to look like a random mutation … the kind that results in an apocalyptic virus, or mutants with superpowers, or something else that is much more appealing as a plot device in a movie or TV …
The COIN-OR project provides a home to a number of open source software projects useful in operations research, primarily optimization programs and libraries. Possibly the most “senior” of these projects is CLP, a single-threaded linear program solver. Quoting the project description: CLP is a high quality open-source LP solver. Its main strengths are its Dual …
If you are a Java (or Scala) (or maybe Clojure?) programmer interested in analytics, and in particular machine learning, you should take a look at Deeplearning4j (DL4J). Quoting their web site: Deeplearning4j is the first commercial-grade, open-source, distributed deep-learning library written for Java and Scala. Integrated with Hadoop and Spark, DL4J is designed to be …
At a recent R user group meeting, the discussion at one point focused on two of the possibly lesser known (or lesser appreciated?) functions in the base package: get and assign. The former takes a string argument and fetches the object whose name is contained in the string. The latter does the opposite, assigning an …
In some circumstances, you might want to build an optimization model containing two sets of variables, say and , and constrain them so that the sort order of each matches. That condition is easily expressed in logical terms: if and only if for all pairs with . Translating that into a mathematical programming model that …
I’ve written before (here and here) about using the open-source Impressive program to display PDF presentations. It’s been quite a while since I used it, or any other presentation software for that matter — retired geezers don’t do a lot of presenting — but I’ll be helping the INFORMS Student Chapter at the University of …
Friday I used my laptop (Acer Aspire V5-131, Linux Mint 17.3) at a coffee shop with no problems. Saturday it wouldn’t boot. The specific error message was: Broadcom UNDI PXE2.1 v15.0.1 <blah blah blah> PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable PXE-M0F: Exiting Broadcom PXE ROM No bootable device — insert boot disk and press any …
I don’t recall the details, but in a group conversation recently someone brought up the fact that if you flip a fair coin repeatedly until you encounter a particular pattern, the expected number of tosses needed to get HH is greater than the expected number to get HT (H and T denoting head and tail …
Fellow OR blogger Erwin Kalvelagen just posted a MINLP model for a puzzle apparently posed by French mathematician Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac. You can read the puzzle statement on Erwin’s blog; a brief synopsis is that you are looking to find four integer weights that sum to 40, such that any object with integer …
My MythTV setup recently broke in an “interesting” way, and the fix I came up with is a bit involved … so be warned, what follows is a major kludge. Setup Before explaining the pathology (and fix), I need to describe the setup. I have Mythbuntu installed on a PC whose only function is to …
For quite a while, I was getting security nags from Firefox every time a web site wanted to run a Java applet. Firefox would tell me I needed to upgrade to the latest version of Java. That would have been fine, except that I was already running the latest Java (1.8.0_66 as of this writing). …
I’ve previously ranted about the need for a “journalistic analytics” college major, to help with reporting (and editing) news containing statistical analysis. Today I read an otherwise well written article that inadvertently demonstrates how easy it is for even seasoned reporters to slip up. The cover story of the November 9 issue of Time magazine, …
In my last post (OLS Oddities), I mentioned that OLS linear regression could be done with multicollinear data using the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse. I want to tidy up one small loose end. Specifically, let be the matrix of predictor observations (including a column of ones if a constant term is desired), let be a vector of …
During a couple of the lectures in the Machine Learning MOOC offered by Prof. Andrew Ng of Stanford University, I came across two statements about ordinary least squares linear regression (henceforth OLS) that surprised me. Given that I taught regression for years, I was surprised that I could be surprised (meta-surprised?), but these two facts …
A tip in the Google+ Statistics and R community led me to the reprex package for R. Quoting the author (Professor Jennifer Bryan, University of British Columbia), the purpose of reprex is to [r]ender reproducible example code to Markdown suitable for use in code-oriented websites, such as StackOverflow.com or GitHub. Much has been written about …
Two years ago (two years and one day if you’re being picky), I posted a pointer to a Spanish language web site hosted by Francisco Yuraszeck (professor at the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Viña del Mar, Chile). The site, Gestión de Operaciones, is listed in the resources box on the right. Recently, Francisco …
In a previous entry, I posted code for hack I came up with to add vertical scrolling to the sidebar of a web-based application I’m developing in Shiny (using shinydashboard). Since then, I’ve bumped into two more issues, leading to two more hacks that I’ll describe here. First, I should point out that I’m using …
A somewhat curious question showed up on a forum today. The author of the question has an optimization model (I’ll assume it is either a linear program or mixed integer linear program) of the form \begin{alignat*}{2} & \textrm{maximize} & & \sum_{i=1}^{N}x_{i}\\ & \textrm{s.t.} & & x\in\mathcal{X} \end{alignat*} where the feasible region $\mathcal{X}$ is presumably polyhedral. …
You know that “autocomplete” feature on your smart phone or tablet that occasionally (or, in my case, frequently) turns into an “autocorrupt” feature? I just ran into it in an R script. I wrote a web-based application for a colleague that lets students upload data, run a regression, ponder various outputs and, if they wish, …
ORiginals is a YouTube channel co-hosted by Dr. Banafsheh Behzad (@banafsheh_b) of CSU Long Beach and my colleague Dr. David Morrison (@drmorr0). They present short (five or six minute) videos featuring researchers describing their research to a general (non-expert) audience. Their tag line is “Outstanding research in everyday language”, and I think the first two installments …
I bumped into a scrolling issue while writing a web-based application in Shiny, using the shinydashboard package. Actually, there were two separate problems. The browser apparently cannot discern page height. In Firefox and Chrome, this resulted in vertical scrollbars that could scroll well beyond the bottom of a page. That’s mildly odd, but not a …
I just wrapped up (knock on wood!) a coding project using R and Shiny. (Shiny, while way cool, is incidental to this post.) It was a favor for a friend, something she intends to use teaching an online course. Two of the tasks, while fairly mundane, generated code that was just barely obscure enough to …
I like R. I like Java. I hate the rJava package, or more precisely I hate installing or updating it. Something (often multiple somethings) always goes wrong. I forget that for some reason I need to invoke root privileges when installing it. It needs a C++ library that I could swear I have, except I …
Something along the following lines cropped up recently, regarding a discrete optimization model. Suppose that we have a collection of binary variables $x_i \in B, \, i \in 1,\dots,N$ in an optimization model, where $B=\{0, 1\}$. The values of the $x_i$ will of course be dictated by the combination of the constraints and objective function. …
Fair warning: most of this post is specific to Linux users, and in fact to users of Debian-based distributions (e.g., Debian, Ubuntu or Mint). The first section, however, may be of interest to R users on any platform. An alternative to “official” R By “official” R, I mean the version of R issued by the …
Disclaimers: This a post about statistics versus decision analytics, not a prescription for improving the educational system in the United States (or anywhere else, for that matter). tl;dr. The genesis of today’s post is a blog entry I read on Spartan Ideas titled “Is Michigan Turning Away Good Teachers?” (Spartan Ideas is a “metablog”, curated …
This is a quick (?) recap of an answer I posted on a support forum earlier today. I will couch it in terms somewhat specific to CPLEX, but with minor tweaks it should apply to other mixed-integer programming solvers as well. It is possible to “warm start” CPLEX (and, I’m pretty sure, at least some …
There is a recent package for the R statistics system named “Radiant”, available either through the CRAN repository or from the author’s GitHub site. It runs R in the background and lets you poke at data in a browser interface. If you are looking for a way to present data to end-users and let them …
Someone asked an interesting question on a support forum recently. The gist was: “How do I confirm that my model is correct?” On the occasions that I taught simulation modeling, this was a standard topic. Looking back, I don’t recall spending nearly as much time on it when teaching optimization, which was a mistake on …
A tweet by Nate Brixius (@natebrix) led me to read the article “The Natural Order and Divine Order of Optimization” published by the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, a rebuttal/counterpoint to a New York Times Magazine article titled “A Sucker is Optimized Every Minute“. The former sings the praises of optimization (somewhat) and the latter vilifies …
I just finished adding a feature to a utility library I use in Java projects that employ either CPLEX or CP Optimizer. In addition, I moved the files to a new home. The library is free to use under the Eclipse Public License 1.0. The code is mentioned in previous posts, so I’ll just quickly …
Something weird happened with SSH today, and I’m documenting it here in case it happens again. I was minding my own business, doing some coding, on a project that is under version control using Git. After committing some changes, I was ready to push them up to the remote (a GitLab server here at Michigan …
Periodically, on OR Exchange and other forums, I encounter what are surely homework problems involving the construction of optimization models. “The Acme Anvil Corporation makes two types of anvils, blue ones and red ones. Blue anvil use 185 kg. of steel and have a gross revenue of $325 each; red anvils …” Really? Does anyone …
Armed with the contents of my last two posts (“The Geometry of a Linear Program“, “Branching Partitions the Feasible Region“), I think I’m ready to get to the question that motivated all this. Let me quickly enumerate a few key take-aways from those posts: The branch and bound method for solving an integer linear program …
Yesterday’s post got me started on the subject of the geometry of a linear program (LP). Today I want to review another well-known geometric aspect, this time of integer linear programs (ILPs) and mixed integer linear programs (MILPs), that perhaps slips some people’s minds when they are wrestling with their models. Most solvers use some …
I frequently see questions on forums, in blog comments, or in my in-box that suggest the person asking the question is either unfamiliar with the geometry of a linear program, unsure of the significance of it, or just not connecting their question to the geometry. This post is just the starting point for addressing some …
My laptop is not exactly a screamer, but it’s adequate for my purposes. I run Linux Mint 17 on it (Xfce desktop), which uses Thunar as its file manager. Not too long ago, I installed the RabbitVCS version control tools, including several plugins for Thunar needed to integrate the two. Lately, Thunar has been incredibly …
As part of a recent analytics project, I needed to convert strings containing (English) names of months to the corresponding cardinal values (1 for January, …, 12 for December). The strings came from a CSV file, and were translated by R to a factor when the file was read. The factor had more than 12 …
A recent question on a web forum, one I’ve seen asked elsewhere, was the following: in a mathematical programming model, how does one constrain a binary variable to take the value 1 if another variable takes a specific (predefined) value, and 0 otherwise? If the binary variable is , the other variable is , and …
I was a math major from undergrad to doctorate, so obviously I think math is fun. Equally obvious to me (especially after teaching a variety of mathematical topics to college students), not everyone shares that opinion, which is too bad. Recently, though, I came across an organization devoted to making math fun for small children, …
My adventure replacing my old Mythbuntu box with a new one continues. It’s been working for a while now, in terms of waking when it should, recording and replaying shows. Yesterday’s immediate concern was sound. The PC hooks to my TV via an HDMI cable. While both live TV and recordings viewed through MythTV worked …