[R] machine learning and horse racing

[Moshe Olshansky]

Hi Stephen,

How many variables do you have?  How many of them are
categorical?
How many observations do you have?
Since I am not a racing expert, in how many races a
typical horse participates? How many years does it
usually span?

In the past I had a good experience with Random
Forest. There exists a RandomForest package in R. If
you run out of memory and do not mind to spend some
time you can try the original Fortran code (after
trying the R package without saving the forest).

Regards,

Moshe.

--- stephenc at ics.mq.edu.au wrote:

> Hi
> 
>  I am trying to use various techniques (eg svm,
> logistic regression,
> neural networks) to classify and predict the outcome
> of horse races.
> 
>  Most of my predictive features are categorical  -
> horse, jockey, trainer 
> - and I keep on running out of memory owing to the
> size of the vector.
> 
>  Does anyone know how to solve the problem?
> 
>  I have classified the outcomes as win/lose or
> place/lose with a view to
> train on x years of results and then testing on the
> subsequent years
> results. Is there some alternate way of looking at
> the problem?
> 
>  Does anyone have pointers to published work in this
> area?
> 
>  Thanks.
> 
>  Stephen
> 
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