Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

A couple of days ago, we talked about nerd fitness. At work, we recorded information on those who joined us for our nerd fitness test, and as promised, I’m releasing that data plus some results of data mining. In order to run the decision tree and neural net analysis yourself, you’ll need to download Weka, a free collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks, made possible by our friends at the University of Waikato, a forward thinking New Zealand University.

You should probably start with datamining.ppt, which is an except from Burdette Pixton’s presentation today and includes his data mining results plus a some brief data mining review. You might also be interested in fitnessdata.xls, a pared-down version of the original spreadsheet. Once you’ve downloaded and installed Weka, these files will come in handy:

• pushupsDiscreteDT.arff — Training data from the pre-bucketed data (Decision Tree)
• pushupsNumerical.arff — Training data from the numerical data (Neural Network)
• TestSetpushupsDiscreteDT.arff — Testing data from the pre-bucketed data (Decision Tree)
• TestSetpushupsNumerical.arff — Testing data from the numerical data (Neural Network)

And finally, here’s what you’ll get if you load those files into weka and run the data mining algorithms: Weka decision tree output & Weka neural net output

Before you say it, just let me say, “yes, I know our sample size is way too small.”

When I was younger, I had a lot of time to run through the woods and climb trees and scale buildings. In high school, my bookbag overflowed with textbooks so that I stayed fit (while probably injuring my spine) lugging them around. In college, my classes were spread out around campus to the point that I had to sprint in between them. The semester I took 21 credits I was *very* fit (also, *very* tired.)

Now-a-days, I am a cubicle warrior. That means I sit on my hindquarters for up to ten hours a day, eating peanut M&Ms and getting fatter (and probably getting an RSI from typing too much (more on that soon.))

In an effort to reverse our fitness decline, my genius friend Burdette and I lead the programmers in push ups and pull ups at work every day. Are you in better shape than a computer programmer? Our programmer fitness test is simple: pull ups and push ups.

Q. How many pull ups/chin ups can you do? Q. How many push ups can you do in 60 seconds? Q. How many 1 arm pull ups (other arm holding your wrist) can you do?

Actually, we’ve begun to gather the data together in order to do some data mining (multiple regression analysis, decision tree, neural network, classification, clustering, etc.) On Wednesday, I’ll release some more information about the findings.

How did I do on our test? Well, I can do 19 pull ups, 7 one arm pull ups, and 63 push ups. Not too bad for a rotund nerd, eh?

Factoid: our British friends call push ups “press ups.”