Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Blog Update 28/06/07

Due to exams, there was only minimal work done throughout this period, and as such, the blog was not updated.

Currently, I am learning Fuzzy Clustering, and Switching Regression techniques in order to perform the analysis which is required for my thesis, the Impact of IT upon Industry Structures. To find out the impact of IT upon industry, one must perform fuzzy clustering and switching regression upon a multi-attribute set of data in order to draw conclusions from the centoids derived from fuzzy clustering.

It has also been decided in the last meeting with Dr Poon that we use R (also known as GNU S), a free software environement statistical modelling, to achieve this aim. Details of this can be found at: http://www.r-project.org/

There is also a meeting with Dr Poon tomorrow to discuss the progress which has been made on this project.

Monday, June 4, 2007

Held Meeting with Dr Simon Poon on last Monday, discussed the thesis topic and what was required. Was given two additional papers to read through before meeting again. Have scheduled to read papers during this week, and also to make notes on paper in order to gain a better working knowledge of the papers.

So far the thesis topic, to my understanding, is about the change which has occurred to industry, as seen from a productivity point of view. My past meetings with Dr Poon have indicated that the change can be mapped as a function, and using fuzzy clustering to find centoids for groups (groups might be defined as an industry). To do this in detail, I require an understanding of econometrics, and also a knowledge of a statistical tool such as shazam to map these functions.