[eam]

I didn't have time to read all of it, but half way through. So far it has bee a pretty good write up, however, just one question.

Can the author or anyone explain how were the amount for values shifted chosen? I.e. Weight (minus 135) and Height (minus 66). Why was -135 and -66 chosen? An explanation would be helpful. Thanks!

[LodeOfCode]

"I arbitrarily chose the shift amounts (135 and 66) to make the numbers look nice. Normally, you’d shift by the mean."

[eam]

I am pretty sure that note wasn't written there before. The author must have updated the article after I posted this question. Though "nice" is still somewhat vague to me. Nice in what way? Smaller numbers are nicer? Negative and positives make it nice?

The second part of the answer is more useful information, "Normally, you’d shift by the mean."

[emgee_1]

I think this a form of normalizing a normal distribution into a standard normal distribution ( a normal distribution has two parameters \mu and \sigma which in standard form gives respectively 0 and 1. Any normal distribution is a special case of the standard normal distribution N(0,1)

[xeRTRex]

I haven't read the article thoroughly but I suspect part of the data preprocessing step included centering and standardizing. Those must be the mean weight and height values.

[jventura]

I think they were chosen such that the weight and height values become negative for Females and positive for Males.