Open Tech Calendar

At this month's meeting we'll be talking about modelling, inference, and prediction.

Shaun Coutts joins us to talk about his experience with R and JAGS:

Getting by with help from family and neighbours: spatially and phylogenetically lagged models in R (with a bit of JAGS).

I am a quantitative ecologist who uses statistical, analytical and simulation models to look at pressing environmental issues such as invasive species and wildlife harvest. I am currently a post doc at the University of Sheffield modelling the evolution of herbicide resistance. I also use these approaches to address a wide range of topics such as population dynamics, community ecology, dispersal ecology, optimal population management, and social-economic systems. I am also interested in how far population models for one species or area can be extrapolated to others, and if so, how it should be done.

Lukas Drapal will introduce us to the online machine learning competition site kaggle:

Compete (and win) on Kaggle.com

Kaggle is a great place to learn data science by doing. Kaggle hosts machine learning competitions and has a very active community that share their techniques and tips. In this talk I describe how Kaggle works, share best practises and dive into challenges of a competition that we won among more than 1500 teams - Allstate Purchase Prediction Challenge.