Skip to main content

Naive modeling

Travel agent

In his book The Algorithm Design Manual, Steven Skiena has several sections called “War Stories” where he talks about his experience designing algorithms for clients.

Here’s an excerpt of a story about finding the best airline ticket prices.

“Look,” I said at the start of the first meeting. “This can’t be so hard. Consider a graph … The path/fare can be found with Dijkstra’s shorted path algorithm. Problem solved!” I announced waving my hand with a flourish.

The assembled cast of the meeting nodded thoughtfully, then burst out laughing.

Skiena had greatly underestimated the complexity of the problem, but he learned, and was able to deliver a useful solution.

This reminds me of a story about a calculus professor who wrote a letter to a company that sold canned food explaining how they could use less metal for the same volume by changing the dimensions of their can. Someone wrote back thanking him for his suggestion listing reasons why the optimization problem was far more complicated than he had imagined. If anybody has a link to that story, please let me know.

Related post: Bring out your equations!

The post Naive modeling first appeared on John D. Cook.



from John D. Cook https://ift.tt/347qGY0
via IFTTT
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Controlling legend appearance in ggplot2 with override.aes

[This article was first published on Very statisticious on Very statisticious , and kindly contributed to R-bloggers ]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here ) Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't. In ggplot2 , aesthetics and their scale_*() functions change both the plot appearance and the plot legend appearance simultaneously. The override.aes argument in guide_legend() allows the user to change only the legend appearance without affecting the rest of the plot. This is useful for making the legend more readable or for creating certain types of combined legends. In this post I’ll first introduce override.aes with a basic example and then go through three additional plotting scenarios to how other instances where override.aes comes in handy. Table of Contents R packages Introducing override.aes Adding a guides() layer Using the guide argument in scale_*() Changing multiple aesthetic par...
Post a Comment
Read more

Using RStudio and LaTeX

(This article was first published on r – Experimental Behaviour , and kindly contributed to R-bloggers) This post will explain how to integrate RStudio and LaTeX, especially the inclusion of well-formatted tables and nice-looking graphs and figures produced in RStudio and imported to LaTeX. To follow along you will need RStudio, MS Excel and LaTeX. Using tikzdevice to insert R Graphs into LaTeX I am a very visual thinker. If I want to understand a concept I usually and subconsciously try to visualise it. Therefore, more my PhD I tried to transport a lot of empirical insights by means of  visualization . These range from histograms, or violin plots to show distributions, over bargraphs including error bars to compare means, to interaction- or conditional effects of regression models. For quite a while it was very tedious to include such graphs in LaTeX documents. I tried several ways, like saving them as pdf and then including them in LaTeX as pdf, or any other file ...
Post a Comment
Read more