The Balding Liquidambar
June 11, 2018
SJM Holdings: Hanging On or Cashing Out?
May 28, 2018
Back in Sep 2015, I wrote this article outlining the investment case for SJM Holdings. The story is simple: the Macau gaming revenue had more than halved by Sep 2015 from a peak in early 2014 because of the corruption crackdown in China, sending Macau gaming stocks crashing more than 70% in some cases; the long-term fundamentals … More SJM Holdings: Hanging On or Cashing Out?
Email Etiquette: A Considerate Use of Bcc
May 21, 2018
Blind carbon copy (bcc) in emails is one of those dangerous features that has significant potential to cause harm when used inappropriately, either by intention or by accident. There are actually not many good usage patterns for bcc, but one that is definitely good and quite under-utilised is its use in politely letting a person … More Email Etiquette: A Considerate Use of Bcc
A Framework to Detect Waste and Fraud in Health Insurance
April 29, 2018
A challenge with fraud-detection problems in many cases is the lack of any meaningful collection of labelled data for supervised-learning approaches to work. Two things practitioners do to tackle the problem are statistical profiling, usually via domain-specific business rules, and statistical outlier detection, sometimes augmented with non-trivial models of what constitute “normal” behaviour. There is … More A Framework to Detect Waste and Fraud in Health Insurance
Large-Scale Distributed Analytics: A Research Program
April 15, 2018
Since starting my part-time appointment as an associate professor at the Australian National University, I have been thinking about spending more time on fundamental research. As Don Knuth counsels, “if you find that you’re spending almost all your time on theory, start turning some attention to practical things; it will improve your theories. If you … More Large-Scale Distributed Analytics: A Research Program
Random Summer Pics
March 18, 2018
2018 Canberra Balloon Spectacular — a 5:30am start to the day but the view was worth it. I set up a small pond in the yard and it has turned into a water hole for all the thirsty bees and wasps from the area. One of the unpleasant summer chores is removing these big huntsman … More Random Summer Pics
The Learn-R Algorithm
March 2, 2018
Identify a problem that would benefit from using R Read An Introduction to R by Venables, Smith, and the R Core Team Work on solving the identified problem using R Get access to resources with lots of R code templates for solving different problems (e.g. Handbook of Statistical Analysis using R by Everitt and Hothorn and Data … More The Learn-R Algorithm
