Bug#240200: RFP: snob-vanilla -- MML-based automatic clustering; unsupervised learning
Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
* Package name : snob-vanilla
Version : x.y.z
Upstream Author : Charles Twardy <ctwardy@alumni.indiana.edu>
* URL : http://www.datamining.monash.edu.au/software/snob
* License : GPL
Description : MML-based automatic clustering; unsupervised learning
Snob is a program for clustering, that is, for discovering the
natural classes in data, without supervision. It is comparable to
AutoClass (also available as a .deb), especially now that newer
versions of AutoClass have started to mimic the Minimum Message
Length induction in Snob. Minimum Message Length induction is a
scale-invariant Bayesian technique based on information theory.
In a paper by Upald and Neufeld (1996)
comparing the unsupervised classifiers Snob, AutoClass, and ART2,
Snob did the best and ART2 the worst, with AutoClass in the middle.
Snob also used to have more powerful heuristics than AutoClass, but
recent versions of AutoClass may have borrowed some of Snob's
heuristics. This (vanilla) version of snob can handle
both continuous and discrete (multistate) variables, but restricts
continuous variables to Gaussian distributions. (Non-free versions
of Snob can handle Poisson, von Mises, and other distributions.) In
addition, the vanilla version assumes all variables are
uncorrelated. Snob has been applied to phenotypic taxonomy,
bioinformatics, image compression, author identification,
clinical psychology, and many other problems. For more
information, see:
http://www.datamining.monash.edu.au/software/snob
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld/minimummessagelength.html
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tildeMML/
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: powerpc (ppc)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.3-rc2-ben1
Locale: LANG=en_AU, LC_CTYPE=en_AU (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_AU)
Snob-Vanilla is the GPL version of Snob. Chris Wallace is the author of
this and most other versions of Snob. He has released this GPL. I have
put it into CVS, made a better Makefile, upgraded the
documentation, and created a .deb which works well enough here. I would
like to include Snob-Vanilla in the official Debian distribution, but
lack the packaging skill to take on that responsibility. I would be
happy to work with someone who has the skill.
I would be willing to pay moderate amounts for this service.
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