Steve Eichert on 31 Jul 2008 14:17:44 -0700 |
Right, and what if in my example, state doesn't impact the probability at all. If belonging to Philly lambda is the key determining factor then taking state into account only throws us out of whack. I'll have to take a look at what's available in excel, perhaps it will help me understand. Steve On Jul 31, 2008, at 4:15 PM, yegg <gabriel.weinberg@gmail.com> wrote: So there would be a 50% chance that Jonathan follows Toby given that he's from NJ. So from what I understand, in order to find the probability that Jonathan follows Toby given that he's in Philly Lambda, and he's from NJ Iwould multiple the probabilities of each together. 1 * .5 = 50%So I think that I could say that there's a 50% chance that a person from NJ and in Philly Lambda follows Toby. Is that correct given this simplisticapproach, or am I doing something wrong?This assumes the attributes are completely independent of each other. Take the case of language attributes, e.g. who uses Perl and Lisp. Suppose both were 50% (of the people who follow Toby). By this logic, the final probability would be 25%. But what if the exact same people who use Lisp also use Perl, then the real answer would be 50% because the additional attribute tells you nothing. It would only be 25% if they were completely independent.I don't know anything about the other stuff you mentioned (Bayes classifier, regression analysis) so I'll have to try and read a bit about them and seehow I may be able to use them.You can do this in Excel. The help is helpful. Basic linear regression is built in. To do more advanced stuff, do Tools->Add Ins, add Analysis and Solver. Then you can do Tools->Data Analysis.
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