The lack of recent Knoware updates on this blog is a good indication of what the statistical aspects of this project mean for a programmer like myself — lots of time reading and researching up front. Aside from things like database design, I've put very little actual code into Knoware for the past week due the sheer amount of knowledge required to understand (let alone successfully apply) Random Forests and Classification & Regression Trees. This particular approach also includes learning a bit of R.

However, I just came across Orange for the second time and actually read the feature list this time. Wow! Could I have asked for a better module? Their Orange For Beginners guide includes examples of classification, bagging, regression, and other processes that make up the bulk of Random Forests. I think this could definitely speed up the process of getting a working system up before September.

Since I'm talking about the pieces I'm using to construct Knoware, I guess I'll mention that I'm working with SQLite right now for the database backend. I've used it for a few projects so far and I've become quite a fan. MySQL and friends are just too much sometimes — users, permissions, configuration, bah!