Defense

Remember the equations that created straight lines or curved parabolas in high school math? Well, Spencer just defended his prospectus on support vector machines, which are basically equations that draw lines like this green one here:

SVMs, as they're called, come in handy when you're classifying data into say, blue or red, or employed or unemployed, or, if you're the U.S. Postal Service, in teaching a computer how to tell a four apart from a nine in an address.

His master's project is setting out to show how SVMs come in handy, too, when you have to impute—which is basically making an educated guess—a missing answer when someone takes a survey and leaves a question response blank.