5 - Birds of a Feather Flashcards
(69 cards)
What was the Cholera Inquiry Committee’s report primarily about?
A severe cholera outbreak in a London parish in 1854
The report highlighted the impact of the outbreak, particularly in the Soho area.
Who was a notable member of the Cholera Inquiry Committee?
John Snow
Snow was a physician known for his contributions to anesthesiology and epidemiology.
What hypothesis did John Snow propose regarding cholera?
Cholera was a waterborne disease
This hypothesis was supported by the clustering of the outbreak around a specific water pump.
What did John Snow’s map of Soho illustrate?
The locations of cholera deaths and water pumps
The map included a dotted line indicating the area affected by cholera.
What is a Voronoi cell?
A region defined such that any point inside is closer to a specific seed than to any other seed
In Snow’s context, the seed was a water pump.
What did Snow’s inner dotted line represent?
Equidistant points from the Broad Street pump and surrounding pumps
It helped demonstrate the relationship between deaths and proximity to water sources.
What modern concept is illustrated by Snow’s analysis of the cholera outbreak?
Nearest neighbor search algorithms
This concept is fundamental in various fields, including machine learning.
What is Manhattan distance?
A measure of distance based on grid-like paths, summing the absolute differences of coordinates
It contrasts with Euclidean distance, which measures straight-line distance.
What historical figure is known for significant contributions to optics and vision?
Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen)
Alhazen’s work transformed the understanding of vision during the Islamic Golden Age.
What is the ‘faculty of discrimination’ according to Alhazen?
The cognitive process that compares what is seen to stored memories
This process aids in recognizing objects.
What algorithm is associated with the concept of nearest neighbors?
Nearest Neighbor (NN) rule
This algorithm was formally analyzed in the 1950s and is crucial for pattern recognition.
True or False: Alhazen’s theories on vision were widely accepted in his time.
False
His ideas were revolutionary compared to the prevailing theories at the time.
Fill in the blank: John Snow’s analysis of the cholera outbreak led to the inspection of the _______.
Broad Street pump
This inspection revealed the contamination source related to the cholera outbreak.
What did the Cholera Inquiry Committee find regarding death rates in the ‘Cholera area’?
Deaths were over 10 percent, about 1,000 to every 10,000 persons living
This statistic highlights the severity of the outbreak.
What was a key innovation in Snow’s mapping technique?
Annotated map showing the correlation between cholera deaths and water pump locations
This visualization was groundbreaking for epidemiology.
How did Snow demonstrate that distance affected cholera infection rates?
He showed that deaths decreased as proximity to the Broad Street pump increased
This finding was crucial in establishing the waterborne theory.
What does the nearest neighbor rule help classify?
Data as belonging to one category or another
Who is associated with the initial concept of the nearest neighbor rule?
Alhazen
What mathematical concept is used to represent points in a 2D or 3D coordinate system?
Vectors
How can a 7×9 image be represented mathematically?
As a 63-dimensional vector
What do the pixels in a 7×9 image represent in terms of values?
0 for white and 1 for black
What happens when you draw a numeral on a touch screen?
The pattern is stored as a 63-bit long number
What is the significance of clustering in the context of the nearest neighbor rule?
Vectors representing similar patterns cluster near each other in 63D space
What is the main task of a machine learning algorithm when given a new unlabeled pattern?
To determine whether it belongs to category 2 or 8
