I didn’t quite meet my goal of finishing the book by the end of last week. I got a little bogged down in a couple chapters. The chapter on exploratory factor analysis was particularly confusing, and I don’t really feel as though I really understand what’s happening. I do vaguely understand that it’s a linear algebra thing that uses some type of principal component analysis technique to reorganize the data. But the concepts that go into the analysis itself were presented in a way that I just couldn’t follow. This may be something I’ll have to investigate later if I need these techniques for something. But after spending a couple days trying to push through it, I’ve decided to just skip it and move on to the last two chapters.

The group project is starting to take shape. We’re going to be doing some type of analysis of UFC fights, attempting to identify features that indicate advantages or something along those lines. We’ve got a meeting later this week to talk about it again and we’ve still got 2 more weeks until it’s due. So that’s plenty of time to deal with it.