I think bullshit is it. The best way I could think of to generate lots of variables is a random forest classifier, which is an ensemble of (say) thousands of t

I think bullshit is it. The best way I could think of to generate lots of variables is a random forest classifier, which is an ensemble of (say) thousands of trees. Each tree constructs a lot of variables at each node, so maybe you'd have (stretching here) hundreds of thousands to perhaps millions of variables. But 1e6 << 1e18. Maybe they're counting each pixel of some remote sensing image of orange groves? Bullshit again, that would have to be a 1e9 x 1e9 pixel image. I'd believe it from NGA (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligence_Agency http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Geospatial-Intelligenc...), but not from Coke. If there's a shred of truth to it, they're using some dodgy mechanism to increase the variable count.