+81 - +8 - 1
adidass - AD - 2
anticipation - AP - 3
Bardonodude - BA - 1
Bulldog - BD - 1
Captain Caveman - CC - 1
dreadnaught - DN - 2
jackhammer - JH - 3
Kayleigh - KL - 1
khfreek - KF - 6
LoathsomePete - LP - 2
Molecules - MC - 2
NumberNineDream - ND - 2
sidewinder - SW - 4
storymilo - SM - 2
toretorden - TT - 6
Urban Hatemonger - UH - 1
wolverinewolfweiselpigeon - WW - 2
zeppy111 - Z1 - 5

Man, bitches don't know 'bout my prog. :mad:

I became a 6 with Anteater in the past few days... is that gonna be bad for the data?

No worries, I can fix it :)

Bump? Any chance we can get the ball rolling with this, I'm rather curious as to how it will turn out.

I left a message on Bardono's profile, but no data yet.

Okay Bardonodude, you had your chance. I've now done the analysis without your data ;)

Here is the matrix :

http://img535.imageshack.us/img535/5...stfmmatrix.png

I've played around with your numbers a bit. The values and scores now reflect eachother like this :

• Very Low = 0
• Low = 20
• Medium = 40
• High = 60
• Very High = 80
• Super = 100

The matrix should be easy to read. If you want to know how similar Jackhammer and Urban Hatemonger are in tastes, just look to Urban's row, then follow it towards the right until you get to Jackhammer's column. The value there is 80 - which is very high similarity.


The Results :

I used the program "Primer" to do the analysis. It was one of hundreds that could do the job, it seems, but I had to use the demo version which wouldn't let me copy & paste. I had to enter everything manually so there could be a typing error, but I think not. Anyways, on with the show :

http://img188.imageshack.us/img188/6...dendrogram.png

Above, you can see a clutter analysis dendrogram. Along the Y axis you have similarity and the lower you have to go through the branching to get from one group to another, the less similar they are. As you can see, Kayleigh forms her own group and is quite the outlier. Basically, her tastes are dissimilar to everyone elses.

I can explain a score here in case someone's confused. Let's look at sidewinder (SW). His most similar neighbours are me (TT) and Zeppy111 (Z1). However, he's closer related to me than he is to Zeppy111. The reason is because Zeppy is also closely related to LoathsomePete who sidewinder has a comparatively poor score, 40, with. The average between the two becomes 60. sidewinder has a better averaged score with me and my closest neighbours, Anteater (AE) and Khfreek (KF) (similarity score of ~67), so he branches closer to our group (TT, AE, KF).

I'll explain another. The group made up by MD and AP have a similarity of 30 to the group made up by CC and +8 - that's how low you have to climb down on the branches to get from one group to the other. The reason it's 30 is members of these groups have a score of 40 with one of the other group and 20 with the other. The average score (20+40/2) then becomes 30.

I have a similarity score of 90 to the group made up by Anteater and Khfreek - because my score is 100 with Anteater and 80 with Khfreek - with the average between them being 90.

I also did some ordination and here's the MDS analysis :


http://img191.imageshack.us/img191/5348/lastfmmds.png

This one is perhaps a little harder to read and (imo) not as good, but the idea is similar as for the dendrogram. The closer you are to someone else, the more similar your tastes are. For example, my tastes are more similar to Anteater's (100) than Kayleigh (0) and Captain Caveman (0). Note that CC is still closer to Anteater than KL is and this is because CC is more similar to people who Anteater also have similarities with. KL is really the lone wolf here.

The problem with this MDS plot is that it has to present the results visually and we don't relate well to eachother on a 2D chart like this so there's going to be errors. How close should you be to someone you are super similar to but who's closest neighbour you are very low with? Basically you can't make it perfect and the stress value indicates how much error, but instead of worrying about the stress value let's just say it's there and so I prefer the dendrogram.

That's it I guess .. any comments? I'm not a statistics master so feel free to tear me a new one if you think I did a bad job. I wanna learn how to do this kind of stuff which is part of why I thought of doing this.

Who knows? Maybe the results were inspiring to some?

By the way, if you have a hard time understanding them, just ask!

No comment on the results yet?

Looks like me, Zeppy, LoathsomePete, Sidewinder, Anteater and Khfreek should have a party together. As a group, we're reasonably compatible - at least when it comes to taste in music. ;)

Kayleigh, you're on your own!

really swell (today's anachronism) job Tore, it might be cool to someday have all the regulars participate. Although last.fm compatibility scores are prone to change quite often, sometimes with no apparent reason...
I particularly dig the group average chart, very clever

jackhammer and urban hatemonger = dr. jekyll and mr. hyde?

I'd have liked to have been involved with this, shame! Great analysis and statistics though, interesting. Although the tree reminds me far too much of my university dissertation thesis, which involved a lot of fiddling round with DNA and plotting phylogenetic trees of maternal inheritance in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Urgh, those programmes were fiddly and inconvenient!

Hehe, I have a reasonably good score with you as well, but your statistical partnership with Mr. Anticipation ruins things a bit :p:

Aside from Kayleigh, you two seem to be the biggest deviants.

Very cool, Tore. Generally this would all go right over my head, so thank you for explaining it all so well. :)

Really nice list Tore. It seems my tastes are pretty compatible... and happy to be grouped with Bulldog and Numbernine:D.

Kayleigh, seems no one like electronica quite as much as you.

One thing about Kayleigh is she hasn't been registered on last.fm for very long either .. barely a month! That's going to have an effect on the statistics so I suggest if we do this again that we set some kind of lower limit to how many plays participants have in their last.fm, perhaps 5000 plays or so. ;)

I loved it, and thanks for the explanations Tore :D
So I won't be joining you for the next similarity project [5000 plays would be hard to get by for next week :P] But I'm sure it'll be interesting.

Very impressive work, tortorden. Just curious as to why made user name in the matrix is '80'? Also I think in the example under the first graph you mean MC not MD. Not trying to be critical, just some things I noticed.

I don't really understand the last graph. Your suppose to have a similar taste to those you are closer to yet Urban and I are quite close on the graph and had a score of 40 where as Captain Caveman and I are further apart but scored a 60. Is this what you mean by errors or am I just reading it wrong?

80? Whoops, must be search and replace error or something >.<

Yep, your observation is part of what I meant about errors. Basically, I couldn't get a very satisfying mds plot. It shows some general trends - f.ex those who are similar to many show up towards the middle of the clutter - but it's not a good fit for everything.

The dendrogram is better!

edit :

Oh, the mds plot shows not just how similar you are in tastes, but it compares all scores with everyone. You may have a low score with someone you're close to, but maybe you're somewhat similar because you share a pattern in similarity/dissimilarity towards other people.

That makes more sense, thanks. Again, good work.

IM UNIQUE :'(. i cant believe i had my own column & everything, not acceptable. and i was the loner on the scattergraph type thing :(.

heyheyhey, anythings possible im going to make myself be included. tore, are you bullying me musically ;)? haha, kidding. its not my fault im an outcast... :(

Similarity to Bardonodude

1. +81 - +8 - 5
2. adidasss - AD - 2
3. Anteater - AE - 1
4. anticipation - AP - 6 (obviously haha)
5. Bardonodude - BD - 6
6. Bulldog - BD - 2
7. Captain Caveman - CC - 5 (no surprise there either haha)
8. Dreadnaught - DN - 2
9. Jackhammer - JH - 2
10. Kayleigh - KL - 1 (lol the only band we have in common is radiohead)
11. khfreek - KF - 4
12. LoathsomePete - LP -2
13. Molecules - MC - 2
14. NumberNineDream - ND - 1
15. Sidewinder - SW - 2
16. storymilo - SM - 1
17. Toretorden - TT - 1
18. Urban Hatemonger - UH - 2
19. wolverinewolfweiselpigeon - WW - 3
20. Zeppy111 - Z1 - 2

alright a little late but here we go

lol just realized that the results are in. no biggy. i dont really know when people message my profile comment thing.

Just click User CP now and then. That's how I keep track of subscribed threads, PMs and so on.

I'm the most MB person of all!

check that LastFM compatibility matrix

it's only between 38, well the ones I have on LastFM. Plus, you can click on the square for more info on your compatibility.

Dang, i would of like to have done this.

Wow .. Neat! Gathering data was really what took time here. Now anyone can just poop out nice similarity plots :)

I might have to play around with that in a couple of days when I have some time.

Good god, that's neat! And I like the other compatibility tabs at the top. It's the kind of stuff offered by RYM (despite being a bit clunky) that I've hoped for at Last.fm. It's a bit clunky here too, though. Script is a bit slow.

But my compatibilities in LastFM has been looking too fishy these past few weeks. I have a SUPER compatibility with more than 10 of the users. It just seems too drastic for taste :/

I'm still at Low's. :(

If you compare with the electronica users, there will be a huge amount of SUPERs.