Conference paper deadline: KES-IDT-11

The deadline for submitting papers to the 3rd International Conference on Decision Technologies 2011 (KES-IDT-11) is 1st February 2011. This conference will be held at the University of Piraeus, Piraeus, Greece, 20-22 July 2011.

Call for papers: ICCCI 2011

The deadline for papers submitted to the International Conference on Collective Intelligence (ICCCI) 2011 is 15 March 2011. The conference will be held in Gdynia, Poland, 21-23 September, 2011.

Missing Value Imputation

An interesting paper in Neural Networks: "Missing value imputation on missing completely at random data using multilayer perceptrons" by Esther-Lydia Silva-Ramíreza, Rafael Pino-Mejíasb, Manuel López-Coelloa, and María-Dolores Cubiles-de-la-Vegac.

In short, they have demonstrated that MLP can be used to impute values that are randomly missing from data sets. They also examine which learning algorithms and network architecture give the best results.

One thing that I would be interested in finding out, though, is how well an ANN trained on the imputed data would perform. In other words, in a situation where you had to impute data to train an ANN, how well would that ANN perform compared to one trained on the complete data set?

Congratulations to Professor Warren Tate, of the Department of Biochemistry at my alma mater the University of Otago, who has been awarded the Rutherford Medal, New Zealand's highest award for scientific research.

Professor Tate and I published some work together (alternative link) several years ago, and apart from being a top scientist, he is also a very nice guy.