SEARCHThe View from Eigenvector
EigenNews and EigenViews from Barry and the Eigenvector staff.
EigenU 2025 Wrap-up
May 17, 2025
The 19th Eigenvector University wrapped up on Friday, May 16. A little smaller this year, we had 32 students from locations as far away as Milan, Italy and Santiago, Chile. EigenU 2025 started with online classes the week before including the new “Introduction to PLS_Toolbox and Solo” developed by our Lyle Lawrence. In person classes […]
Grit, Resilience and Ski Racing
Apr 23, 2025
It may be that the only way to improve your grit is to do things that are hard. — Clare E. Wise, M.D. The end of the ski season is upon us and with it the end of the ski racing season. It has been a great year and I’ve been fortunate to officiate at […]
Overfit < 1??
Feb 25, 2025
I’ve learned a number of things using Diviner, our new semi-automated Machine Learning tool for creating regression models. When you make models in large numbers on each data set you are presented, you begin to see some trends. For me, one of these was the discovery of how some data preprocessing methods work well surprisingly […]
PLS_Toolbox and MATLAB 2025a
Jan 23, 2025
Eigenvector Research has always worked to make PLS_Toolbox compatible with the most current version of MATLAB, plus an approximate five year window of older versions. Compatibility with the upcoming MATLAB 2025a, however, presents unique challenges. In their transition to an entirely HTML-based interface, The MathWorks (TMW) has removed support for Java in 2025a. As a […]
On Turning 30
Jan 6, 2025
Eigenvector Research was founded on January 1, 1995, which means that we just turned 30. When I mentioned writing a piece for the occasion of our 30th anniversary, our Donal O’Sullivan replied “I don’t know if you want people to know we’re that old!” And I understand where he’s coming from. In the software business, especially […]
Year 30
Dec 27, 2023
I believe that days go slow and years go fastAnd every breath’s a gift, the first one to the last – Luke Bryan, ‘Most People are Good’ Eigenvector Research starts its 30th year this January. Reflecting on that made me think of the Luke Bryan quote above. Some days have been long, for sure. For […]
Transparency
Dec 26, 2023
Jonathan Stratton of Optimal posted a nice summary on LinkedIn of the 2nd Annual PAT and Real Time Quality Summit which took place in Boston this month. In it he included the following bullet point: “The age-old concept of data modeling with spectroscopy has been revitalized through the integration of Machine Learning and AI initiatives. […]
In-Person, Live Online or Recorded?
Sep 25, 2023
At Eigenvector Research we offer many courses in chemometrics and machine learning and several ways to take them. As such, I often get variations on the question “what’s the difference between your in-person classes and your online classes?” I’ll address this by starting with what stays the same. We use the same notes, and have […]
Why Solo?
Aug 30, 2023
LCVSF Awards 22 Scholarships
Aug 9, 2023
The Lake Chelan Valley Scholarship Fund (LCVSF) received 48 applications for 2023 and has awarded 22 scholarships, each in the amount of $2500. Awards went to 7 previous award winners now in their second, third or fourth year of study, as well as 10 graduates from Chelan High School (CHS) and 5 graduates from Manson […]
Eigenvector Software Explained
Jun 15, 2023
Eigenvector Research produces a variety of software products for chemometrics and machine learning and we often get asked how they work together. Here’s the roadmap! We have two main packages for modeling, our MATLAB® based PLS_Toolbox, and our stand alone Solo (with versions for Windows, macOS and Linux). Solo is the compiled version of PLS_Toolbox, […]
Chemometrics without Equations
Nov 29, 2022
In 1988 Donald Dahlberg, Professor of Chemistry at Lebanon Valley College (LVC), decided to take a sabbatical leave at the University of Washington (UW) Center for Process Analytical Chemistry (CPAC). At the time, his former student Mary Beth Seasholtz was a second year graduate student in Bruce Kowalski’s Laboratory for Chemometrics. Mary Beth asked Don […]
2022 Lake Chelan Valley Scholarships Announced
Aug 5, 2022
The Lake Chelan Valley Scholarship Foundation (LCVSF) will award 20 scholarships this year to college bound seniors and previous awardees. Recipients are from Chelan Valley schools including Chelan High School (CHS) and Manson High School (MHS). Two graduates from MHS class of ’22 will receive awards: Anthony Martinez and Francisco Munoz; seven members of CHS class of ’22: […]
Evaluating Models: Hating on R-squared
Jun 16, 2022
There are a number of measures that are used to evaluate the performance of machine learning/chemometric models for calibration, i.e. for predicting a continuous value. Most of these come down to reducing the model error, the difference between the reference values and the values predicted (estimated) by the model, to some single measure of “goodness.” […]
Python is free
Apr 5, 2022
PLS_Toolbox is not free. But you don’t have to be a dedicated data scientist to use PLS_Toolbox (or its stand-alone equivalent Solo). Many of its users are, but the real expertise of most users is in something else such as analytical instrumentation (typically spectroscopy) or the specific problem they are working on (e.g. chemical process […]
We used to call it “Chemometrics”
Feb 23, 2022
The term chemometrics was coined by Svante Wold in a grant application he submitted in 1971 while at the University of Umeå. Supposedly, he thought that creating a new term, (in Swedish it is ‘kemometri’), would increase the likelihood of his application being funded. In 1974, while on a visit to the University of Washington, […]
Remembering Svante
Jan 6, 2022
Svante Wold passed away on January 4, 2022, at the age of 81. In the fields of chemometrics and data science, there is no need to use his last name. If you say “Svante,” everybody knows who you are talking about. I first met Svante almost 30 years ago at the Chemometrics in Analytical Chemistry […]
Under Same (Old) Management
Oct 21, 2021
That’s not a headline you see very often. Usually it’s “Under New Management.” But here at Eigenvector Research we’re proud of our stability. I wrote the first version of our MATLAB-based PLS_Toolbox while I was in graduate school thirty-one years ago. I still oversee its development along with our other software products. In 1990 Partial […]
Lake Chelan Valley Scholarships for 2021 Announced
Aug 3, 2021
For 2021 the Lake Chelan Valley Scholarship Fund (LCVSF) will award 18 scholarships to college bound seniors and previous awardees currently attending. Recipients are from Chelan Valley schools including Chelan High School (CHS) and Manson High School (MHS). Included this year are three graduates from MHS class of ’21: Jonathan Fernandez, Cody Fitzpatrick and Zoe […]
The Model_Exporter Revolution
Jan 28, 2021
The development of a machine learning model is typically a fairly involved process, and the software for doing this commensurately complex. Whether it be a Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression model, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) or Support Vector Machine (SVM), there are a lot of calculations to be made to parameterize the model. These include […]