State Networking

Recently, I met with the professor and the grad student in charge of the research project. I discovered that when reviewing the results of the project, that the models we had created were awful. God awful. To give you an idea, statisticians use a measure called R2 to determine how well a model fits that ranges from 0 to 1. A R2 of 1 means that the model perfectly predicts the data. A R2 of 0 means that the model has no relation to the data at all. A good R2 is around 0.8, a decent R2 is around 0.5, and a poor R2 is around 0.3. Our average R2 was around 0.1.

At this point, my professor decided that it would be better for us to reuse the method, but use a different method. While we had been using data at the provider level, she wanted us to aggregate providers to a State level. This would give us a coarser resolution, and hopefully some patterns would emerge. I'll keep you updated.

Juggling Time

Time management is hard. Working on projects is hard. Schoolwork is hard. Put together, it becomes an almost impossible task. Because I don't work in an office, it is hard for me to stay focus. I end up having to juggle homework and research at the same time. It's frustrating when you start research, then end up having to pick your brother up from school or take out the trash. The daily responsibilities of life end up making it hard for me to work at home. At school, in class, there are often even more distractions. For me, the hardest part of doing research at UT is finding a quiet place to work.

A problem I'm running into is not being able to solve all the error messages myself. I'm working with old code, and so its difficult to discern what the previous coder's functions mean or do. To that end, I'm trying to comment my code more to make it more readable, because when working with others, that is the most important thing to do.