We did – in our paper titled “Beyond rankings: comparing directed acyclic graphs” (pdf) which I’ll be presenting at the ECML PKDD conference in Portugal next month. This was the first project of my PhD, but there’s also something else that makes it fundamentally different from the other research projects I’ve been involved with.

Typically, when I undertake a research project, I have a concrete question, like what is the next location a person will visit, to which I start looking for different solutions. In other words, I begin with a nail and start looking for a suitable hammer. However, this time we started by developing a cool new hammer with some neat theoretical properties before we had any idea if a suitable nail even exists. Continue reading →