Looking back on the work I’ve done so far (finding a thesis topic, finding data, finding tools) I can definitely recommend the two books below. They’re R-related and they contain a lot of examples which still help in implementing the ideas I have. The first is Modern Applied Statistics with S (Venables/Ripley) and the other one is Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R (Bivand/Pebesma/Gómez-Rubio) from the „Use R!“ series. It’s just perfect to look up things in those books which you might need in your current implementation. Besides, there’s still the R mailing lists to ask your questions and the authors of the above books are typically present at those lists.

If you prefer a bookstore, look out for these on the shelves:

This year’s going to be the deadline for my PhD thesis. It seems like I’m nearly there. A few things are left to be done and upcoming.

At the moment there’s a journal article for GeoInformatica about the spatial variable importance stuff I’ve developed based on Alex‘ suggestions. The results are such that they (at the moment) fit nicely into my thesis. Anyway, the results have an open outcome, but it looks as if an additional variable Elevation introduced into the regression models for yield prediction has a major influence on the quality of the prediction itself. I’m going to run a few more data sets through the models and see whether I keep getting similar results and will further try to falsify my hypothesis.

Then there’s the SCAI 2011 conference in Trondheim, where I’ll hand in an article about the spatial clustering I’ve developed. And I’ll try to meet a few other people while I’m there to see if there are any further postdoc opportunities at NTNU.

My own workshop, Data Mining in Agriculture 2011, is going to take place in conjunction with ICDM’2011, which is going to be held in NYC, US.

And then there’s the book Computational Intelligence of which I’m an author, due by the end of March.