"Do I believe in Astrology"? This is a question that I used to think about when I was a kid. What could be a possible relation between celestial bodies and human nature when looking from a scientific perspective? How do you really quantify human mood ? It was some 20 years ago, when I read upon a topic in some science magazine that my Mom brought me. It was on the activities of Pineal glands and occurance of flight accidents. Pineal glands are some glands in our body which are called 'biological clocks', since they control our temporal functions like aging, fertilization etc. These glands are set when we are born and they go through some 'activities' with some frequency. The claim in the magazine was that there is some relation between the birthday of the flight captian and the accident dates. Well, that was an interesting thought and seemed to give a possible scientific explanation (atleast for a kid), stating that you are trying to model the state of your Pineal gland (which basically controls your mood) as a function of the position of celestial bodies. I am not very sure how much is this true though!
Well, now I have grown up and have come a long way travelling through time for the past 20 years, and I had more or less rejected any other possible explanations of my astrological relations. Actually, I had stopped believing in astrology, since finding a relation between some biological activities and position of celestial objects was a bit too overwroughted and fancy from an engineering or mathematical perspective. It was a few years back, when this anecdotal event happened. I was in Hyderabad and a friend visited me. It was early in the morning and he was reading the newspaper, when I fancily asked him what was intersting about my horoscope that day! He perused through the paper and started laughing saying that I was going to have a big trouble because of a friend that day! We laughed it across and went ahead with our day! Everything was normal, when towards evening my friend started getting blisters on his face!! He was actually taking care of another friend who had chicken pox a few days earlier! Well, such prognostications happen many a times in our lives and we just passes it aside believing mere coincidence. But is there any deeper meaning to it ? Can we build a theory between astrology and the rest of the scientific knowledge ?
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Now, let me get to my point. My idea is not to see why astrology works, but trying to figure out what could be a possible mathematical framework for it to work. Suppose we have a huge database of the birthday of people and their mood for everyday or say possibly every unit of time. Suppose we have a huge astronomical database of the positions of various celestial objects. Suppose we do a cross-correlation between these two datasets, do a dimensionality reduction and project the data onto the principal axis? More mathematically, we can confine our mood of people to whether they are happy or not; where, say happy is greater than being sad. Later doing some kind of an isotonic regression to map it as a function. Here, the principal axis of projection will provide us with the most important celestial object whose path influences our horoscopes the most. The approach is just what we use in Machine learning for prediction or regression, except that now we are trying to draw a parallel between a scientific technique and some fringe-science. Just like the case that the predictions by machine learning techniques will not give us an absolute answer, we know that horoscopes also will not (Possibly because we are not considering all the directions of variations). People have been collecting astronomical data and associating it with human nature since ages and when the dataset approaches infinity, the relationships become more and more apparant (assuming there is a relationship), and we are seeing this, anyways (looking back at my story) :) .
Ok! So what next? Well, in this world of mass communication and internet, it might not be a big problem to collect the moods of people (let say we just use the status of Gtalk or Facebook :) especially the similies :P ) and getting the birthdays of people is even more trivial. We have an 'infinite' number of people using these programs and a company like Google can very well get this information in no time. Astronomical data is always there since ages. Now, from the above process if some useful pattern comes out then probably we can make better predictions about the mood of people! Hmm... that might be a bit scary! but atleast its nice to think it will work :) Well, it should work, since the horoscopes I belive to some extend does work and "seemingly there is some relation"!
In conclusion, the target of this blog is not to prove anything, but to hint that using Machine learning techniques could possibly put some light on saying that there is something to be believed in horoscopes, and trying to find the exact connection between human nature and celestial bodies is worth a try!!
