Discovering the hidden or "latent" factors in your data set is a handy way to reduce the size of the problem that you have to compute, and it works because humans are predictable: people who like Emo music are sad, and sad people also like the soundtracks to movie versions of vampire novels that are about yearning, etc.
In 2014, the non-partisan FairVote Center made predictions in 368 of the 435 congressional races -- without factoring in polling data or campaign expenditures.
Brian Whitman, an Echo Nest co-founder, told me that programmers also hope to learn more about listeners by factoring in data such as "what the weather is like, what your relationship status is now on Facebook".
Scheduling is done by an algorithm factoring in data from Singu and third parties, including location and weather.
(A product list is at energystar.gov.) Many Web sites offer calculators to help figure out carbon profiles, factoring in data like a house's age, its insulation and the types of fuel, electricity and bulbs used.
You tell the app where you want to go, and it suggests a route and transport method(s), factoring in real-time data on disruptions en route.
Google will automatically find your best shots, factor in location data and stitch them together into travelogue collections.
A computer can factor in objective data, but a worker must take that data and then overlay it with subjective understanding that can't always be quantified.
That was one of the conclusions, at least, from a new paper appropriately titled "Demographics, Weather and Online Reviews". The study analyzed 1.1 million online reviews of 840,000 restaurants, looking for exogenous — or external — factors in the data.
Confounding factors in unsupervised data can lead to undesirable clustering results.
The challenge with using this strategy on its own is it treats all categories and items the same and does not factor in spending data.
