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Roommate matching algorithm

I'm currently in an advanced data structure class and learned a good bit about the graph. For this summer, I was asked to help write an algorithm to match roommates. Now for my data structure class, I've written a City Path graph and performs some sorting and prims algorithms and I'm sort of thinking that a graph may be a great place to start with my roommate matching algorithm.
I was thinking that our data base could just be a text file, nothing too fancy. However I could initialize each nodes in the graph as a student each student would have an un-directed edge to many more students (no edge to the student who doesn't want to be roommate with another one, the sorority also doesn't want repeating roommate). Now I could also make the edge weights more, depending on the special interest.
Everything listed above is quite simple and I don't think I'll run into any problem implementing it. But here is my question:
How should I update the common interest field? Should I start that with a physical survey and then go back into the text file and update the weight of the edge manually? Or should I be creating a field that keeps track of the matching interests?

What you're trying to design is called bipartite matching. Fortunately unlike other bipartite matching algorithms, you won't need fancy graph algorithms and complex implementation for this. This is very close of Stable Marriage Problem and surprisingly there are very effective even easier algorithm for this.
If you are interested, I can share my C++ implementation of stable marriage problem.

Working with data in java

I've been using a formula for some time to try to find value in spreads for sports betting and done this by basically creating my own spread and comparing to what bookies offer and would like to automate the process.
I've written some code in java which will do the maths on the data I give it and I'm looking for a way to populate the input data either from a database or from an xml file I create but i'm quite new to programming.
Say for example if I pick two teams to compare. For each team I need a list of the teams they played, how many points each team scored in total, how many points each team conceded in total and how many games each team played so I can run the maths on those figures and I have no idea where to start. Could anyone help me or point me in the right direction?

It sounds like you've defined your problem (how to start), and also listed the information you need to get started (compare two teams, points, previous games, conceded points, etc). Are you sure you don't know how to start?
For a point in the right direction - I recommend creating a test case where you select two teams, give them some sample data for their previous games, points scored and conceded, and start working on the structure of your program.
This question lends itself too much to personal opinion and personal experience, and that makes it difficult to give you definitive answers without looking at any code or a program layout.
Give it your best effort and reply back with what you come up with, that will be much easier to critique and offer suggestions to.

Want to implement a reinforcement learning connect four agent

I want to implement a reinforcement learning connect four agent.
I am unsure how to do so and how it should look. I am familiar with the theoretical aspects of reinforcement learning but don't know how they should be implemented.
How should it be done?
Should I use TD(lambda) or Q-learning, and how do MinMax trees come in to this?
How does my Q and V functions work (Quality of action and Value of state). How do I score those things? What is my base policy which I improve, and what is my model?
Another thing is how should I save the states or statesXactions (depending on the learning algorithm). Should I use neural networks or not? And if yes, how?
I am using JAVA.
Thanks.

This might be a more difficult problem than you think, and here is why:
The action space for the game is the choice of column to drop a piece into. The state space for the game is an MxN grid. Each column contains up to M pieces distributed among the 2 players.This means there are (2M+1-1)N states. For a standard 6x7 board, this comes out to about 1015. It follows that you cannot apply reinforement learning to the problem directly. The state value function is not smooth, so naíve function approximation would not work.
But not all is lost. For one thing, you could simplify the problem by separating the action space. If you consider the value of each column separately, based on the two columns next to it, you reduce N to 3 and the state space size to 106. Now, this is very manageable. You can create an array to represent this value function and update it using a simple RL algorithm, such as SARSA.
Note, that the payoff for the game is very delayed, so you might want to use eligibility traces to accelerate learning.

String analysis and classification

I am developing a financial manager in my freetime with Java and Swing GUI. When the user adds a new entry, he is prompted to fill in: Moneyamount, Date, Comment and Section (e.g. Car, Salary, Computer, Food,...)
The sections are created "on the fly". When the user enters a new section, it will be added to the section-jcombobox for further selection. The other point is, that the comments could be in different languages. So the list of hard coded words and synonyms would be enormous.
So, my question is, is it possible to analyse the comment (e.g. "Fuel", "Car service", "Lunch at **") and preselect a fitting Section.
My first thought was, do it with a neural network and learn from the input, if the user selects another section.
But my problem is, I don´t know how to start at all. I tried "encog" with Eclipse and did some tutorials (XOR,...). But all of them are only using doubles as in/output.
Anyone could give me a hint how to start or any other possible solution for this?
Here is a runable JAR (current development state, requires Java7) and the Sourceforge Page

Forget about neural networks. This is a highly technical and specialized field of artificial intelligence, which is probably not suitable for your problem, and requires a solid expertise. Besides, there is a lot of simpler and better solutions for your problem.
First obvious solution, build a list of words and synonyms for all your sections and parse for these synonyms. You can then collect comments online for synonyms analysis, or use parse comments/sections provided by your users to statistically detect relations between words, etc...
There is an infinite number of possible solutions, ranging from the simplest to the most overkill. Now you need to define if this feature of your system is critical (prefilling? probably not, then)... and what any development effort will bring you. One hour of work could bring you a 80% satisfying feature, while aiming for 90% would cost one week of work. Is it really worth it?
Go for the simplest solution and tackle the real challenge of any dev project: delivering. Once your app is delivered, then you can always go back and improve as needed.

String myString = new String(paramInput);
if(myString.contains("FUEL")){
//do the fuel functionality
}

In a simple app, if you will be having only some specific sections in your application then you can get string from comments and check it if it contains some keywords and then according to it change the value of Section.

If you have a lot of categories, I would use something like Apache Lucene where you could index all the categories with their name's and potential keywords/phrases that might appear in a users description. Then you could simply run the description through Lucene and use the top matched category as a "best guess".
P.S. Neural Network inputs and outputs will always be doubles or floats with a value between 0 and 1. As for how to implement String matching I wouldn't even know where to start.

It seems to me that following will do:
hard word statistics
maybe a stemming class (English/Spanish) which reduce a word like "lunches" to "lunch".
a list of most frequent non-words (the, at, a, for, ...)
The best fit is a linear problem, so theoretical fit for a neural net, but why not take immediately the numerical best fit.

A machine learning algorithm such as an Artificial Neural Network doesn't seem like the best solution here. ANNs can be used for multi-class classification (i.e. 'to which of the provided pre-trained classes does the input represent?' not just 'does the input represent an X?') which fits your use case. The problem is that they are supervised learning methods and as such you need to provide a list of pairs of keywords and classes (Sections) that spans every possible input that your users will provide. This is impossible and in practice ANNs are re-trained when more data is available to produce better results and create a more accurate decision boundary / representation of the function that maps the inputs to outputs. This also assumes that you know all possible classes before you start and each of those classes has training input values that you provide.
The issue is that the input to your ANN (a list of characters or a numerical hash of the string) provides no context by which to classify. There's no higher level information provided that describes the word's meaning. This means that a different word that hashes to a numerically close value can be misclassified if there was insufficient training data.
(As maclema said, the output from an ANN will always be floats with each value representing proximity to a class - or a class with a level of uncertainty.)
A better solution would be to employ some kind of word-relation or synonym graph. A Bag of words model might be useful here.
Edit: In light of your comment that you don't know the Sections before hand,
an easy solution to program would be to provide a list of keywords in a file that gets updated as people use the program. Simply storing a mapping of provided comments -> Sections, which you will already have in your database, would allow you to filter out non-keywords (and, or, the, ...). One option is to then find a list of each Section that the typed keywords belong to and suggest multiple Sections and let the user pick one. The feedback that you get from user selections would enable improvements of suggestions in the future. Another would be to calculate a Bayesian probability - the probability that this word belongs to Section X given the previous stored mappings - for all keywords and Sections and either take the modal Section or normalise over each unique keyword and take the mean. Calculations of probabilities will need to be updated as you gather more information ofcourse, perhaps this could be done with every new addition in a background thread.

Java Program using 4D array [closed]

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I'm a first year computer engineering student and I'm quite new here. I have been learning Java for the past three and a half months, and C++ for six months before that. My knowledge of Java is limited to defining and using own methods, absolute basics of object-oriented programming like use of static data members and member visibility.
This afternoon, my computer programming prof taught us about multi-dimensional arrays in Java. About multi-dimensional arrays being simply arrays of arrays and so on. He mentioned that in nominal, educational programming, arrays beyond 2 dimensions are almost never used. Even 3D arrays are used only where absolutely essential, like carrying out scientific functions. This leaves next to zero use for 4D arrays as using them shows that "you're using the wrong datatype" in my prof's words.
However, I'd like to write a program in which the use of a 4D array, of any data type, primitive or otherwise, is justified. The program must not be as trivial as printing the elements of the array.
I have no idea where to begin, this is why I am posting this here. I'd like your suggestions. Relevant problem statements, algorithms, and bits and pieces of code are also welcome.
Thank you.
Edit: Forgot to mention, I have absolutely no idea about working with GUIs in Java, so please do not post ideas that implement GUIs.

Ideas:
- Matrix multiplication and it's applications like finding shortest path in graphs
- Solving of systems of equations
- Cryptography -- many cryptoprotocols represent data or keys or theirs internal structures in a form of matrices.
- Any algo on graphs represented as matrices
I must have been having some kind of fixation on matrices, sorry :)
For 4D arrays one obvious thing I can think of is the representation of 3D environment changing in time, so 4th dimension represents time scale. Or any representation of 3D which have additional associated property placed in 4th dimension of array.

You could create a Sodoku hypercube with 4 dimensions and stores the numbers the user enters into a 4dimensional int array.

One use could be applying dynamic programming to a function that takes 4 integer parameters f(int x,int y,int z,int w). To avoid calling this expensive function over and over again, you can cache the results in a 4D array, results[x][y][z][w]=f(x,y,z,w);.
Now you just have to find an expensive integer function with arity of 4, oh, and a need for calculating it often...

Just to back him up,..your prof is quite right. I'm afraid I might be physically violent to anyone using a 4D+ array in production code.
It's kinda cool to be able to go into greater than 3 dimensions as an educational exercise but for real work it makes things way too complicated because we don't really have much comprehension of structures with greater than 3 dimensions.
The reason it's difficult to come up with a practical use for 4D+ arrays is because there is (almost) nothing that complicated in the real world to model.
You could look into modelling something like a tesseract , which is (in layman's terms ) a 4D cube or as Victor suggests use the 4th dimension to model constant time.
HTH

There are many possible uses. As others have said, you can model a hypercube or something that makes use of a hypercube as well as modeling a change over time. However, there are many other possible uses.
For example, one of the theoretical simulation models of our universe uses 11th dimensional physics. You can write a program to model what these assumed physics would look like. The user would only be able to see a 3-dimensional space which definitely limits usability, but the 4th dimensional coordinate could act like the changing of a channel allowing the user to change their perspective. If a 4th dimensional explosion occurs, for example, you might even want a 5th dimensional array so that you can model what it looks like in each connected 3-dimensional space as well as how it looks in each frame of time.
To take a step away from the scientific, think about an MMORPG. Today many of those games uses "instanced" locations which means that a copy of a given zone is created exclusively for the use of a given group of players so to prevent lag. If this "instanced" concept was given a 4th dimensional coordinate and it allows players to shift their position across instances it could effectively allow all server worlds to be merged together while allowing the players a great deal of control over where they go while decreasing cost.
Of course, your question wants to know about ideas without using a GUI. That's a bit more difficult because you are working in a 2D environment. One real application would be Calculus. We have 3D graphing calculators, but for higher dimensions you pretty much have to do it by hand. A pogram that aims to solve these calculations for you might not be able to properly display the information, but you can certainly calculate it. Also, when hologaphic interfaces become a widespread reality it may be possible to represent a hypercube graph in 3D making such a program useful.
You might be able to write a text based board game where the position of pieces is represented with text. You can add dimensions and game rules to use them.
The simplest idea I could give you is a save state system. At each interval the program in memory is copied and stored into a file. It's coordinate is it's position in time. At face value you may not need a 4D array to handle this, but suppose the program you were saving states of used a 3D array. You could set it up to represent each saved state as a position in time that you can make use of and then view the change in time.

I'm not sure what specifically you could do with this, because I just started thinking about it. But you could possibly use a 4D array for some sort of basic physics simulation, like modeling a projectile flight involving some wind values and what not. That just came to mind because the term 4D always brings to mind that the "position" of any object is 4 values, with time as the 4th.

Being a physics student we have only 3 dimension of space but we have a 4th dimension which is time. So thinking in that way we can think of an array of any dimension(1D or 2D or 3D) whose values differ with time or an array which keeps the record of every array whose values changed with time.
It seems to be quite known to us. For example the "ATTENDANCE REGISTER" which we usually have in our classroom.
This is my view to it.
That's it.
Enjoy :-)

To give a concrete example for the Ishtar's answer: Four-string alignment. To compute optimal two-string alignment, you write one string along one (say, horizontal) axis of a 2D-array (a matrix!) and the other one along the other array. The array is filled with edit costs, and the optimal alignment of the two strings is the one which produces the lowest cost, associated with a path through the matrix. A common way of finding such a path is by the above mentioned dynamic programming. You can look up 'Levenshtein distance' or 'edit distance' for technical details.
The basic idea can be expanded to any number of strings. For four strings you'd need a four-dimensional array, to write each string along one of the dimensions.
In practice, however, multiple string alignment is not done this way, for at least two reasons:
Lack of flexibility: Why would you need to align exactly four strings??? In computational molecular biology, for example, you might wish to align many strings (think of DNA sequences), and their number is not known in advance, but it is seldom four. You program would be useful for a very limited class of problems.
Computational complexity, in space and time. The requirements are exponential in the number of dimensions, making the approach impractical for most real-world purposes. Besides, most of the entries in such multi-dimensional array would lie on such suboptimal paths, which are never even touched, so that storing them would be simply waste of space.
So, for all practical purposes, I believe your professor was right.