Social Data: Collecting, Mining, and Using it in Your Applications

Huge sets of data are generated every day by people using online applications, whether they’re blogging, shopping, or just clicking on links. Many techniques for analyzing and interpreting these datasets exist in the fields of visualization, data-mining, and machine learning, making it possible to use this data to draw new conclusions, build predictive models, and make web applications smarter.

• Movie preference data from MovieLens
• The top bloggers on Technorati
• Personal ads on Craigslist
• Home prices on Zillow
• Messages from Google Groups
• People on Hot Or Not

• Collaborative filtering
• Hierarchical and K-Means Clustering
• Multidimensional Scaling
• Classification and Regression Trees
• Independent Feature Extraction

Segaran will show you some collected data, an overview of how the algorithms work, some results and ideas about how the various techniques could be incorporated into a web application.