Thursday, January 3, 2013

Could Nate Silver Predict How Good Your Pumpkin Pie Will Be? | Reduction

Could Nate Silver Predict How Good Your Pumpkin Pie Will Be?

Excerpt:

In this food "social network," ingredients that are often in the same recipes sit close to each while foods that rarely appear together are far apart. In this food "social network," ingredients that are often in the same recipes sit close to each while foods that rarely appear together are far apart. Courtesy of Lada Adamic. We've been hearing a lot recently about how algorithms can predict just about anything. They find long-lost friends on Facebook and guess which books we'll buy next on Amazon. Algorithms hit the big time this month, when New York Times blogger Nate Silver used mathematical models and statistics to correctly forecast the outcome of every state in the presidential election. So what about food? Could these same math whizzes help us bake a better pumpkin pie or mix up a tastier batch of sweet potatoes this Thanksgiving?

People:

Lada Adamic

Overall Sentiment: 0.0861262

Relevance: 0.821395

SentimentQuote
-0.151352"The networks tell us about the flexibility of recipes, which ingredients are frequently swapped or modified," Adamic tells ...
-0.17393"One of the top things was substituting applesauce for vegetable oil," Adamic says. ...
-0.042962"One of the top things was substituting applesauce for vegetable oil," Adamic says. "We thought that this was ridiculous, but then we learned it was a basic health food trick."
-0.218265"I was having trouble moving beyond literally reading the recipe and then following it exactly," Adamic says. ...
0"In general, I just believe in data," she says. ...
-0.0493169"In general, I just believe in data," she says. "There's all these recipes out there. So maybe we can just look at the data and automatically figure out how flexible the recipes are. Now I feel more comfortable using spices more freely."
Sentiment Stats:
  • Number of Quotes: 6
  • Aggregate Sentiment: -0.6358259
  • Mean: -0.10597098333333
  • Standard Deviation: 1.4142135623731

Nate Silver

Overall Sentiment: 0.239421

Relevance: 0.235589

Key:

  • Aggregate Sentiment is meant to be an indicator of an individual's overall sentiment.
  • The Mean is meant to be an indicator of an individual's average comment sentiment.
  • The Standard Deviation, when there are enough quotes, will indicate an individual's consistency of sentiment (i.e. a Standard Deviation of 0 would mean they were very consistent in their sentiment and 1 would mean they were very inconsistent).

Note that quote stats are likely to be meaningless beyond the aggregate score due to the tiny sample size. However, they are always provided just in case you find something useful there.

Additional Info:

Holiday: Thanksgiving

Overall Sentiment: 0.0366852

Relevance: 0.326414

Company: Facebook

Overall Sentiment: 0.0949733

Relevance: 0.431198

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