Whether you implement a neural network yourself or you use a built in library for neural network learning, it is of paramount importance to understand the significance of a sigmoid function. The sigmoid function is the key to understanding how a neural network learns complex problems. This function also served as a basis for discovering […]
Machine learning is a large field of study that overlaps with and inherits ideas from many related fields such as artificial intelligence. The focus of the field is learning, that is, acquiring skills or knowledge from experience. Most commonly, this means synthesizing useful concepts from historical data. As such, there are many different types of […]
Supervised machine learning is often described as the problem of approximating a target function that maps inputs to outputs. This description is characterized as searching through and evaluating candidate hypothesis from hypothesis spaces. The discussion of hypotheses in machine learning can be confusing for a beginner, especially when “hypothesis” has a distinct, but related meaning […]
Do you have questions like: What data is best for my problem? What algorithm is best for my data? How do I best configure my algorithm? Why can’t a machine learning expert just give you a straight answer to your question? In this post, I want to help you see why no one can ever […]
The development environment that you use for machine learning may be just as important as the machine learning methods that you use to solve your predictive modeling problem. A few times a week, I get a question such as: What is your development environment for machine learning? In this post, you will discover the development […]
Machine learning is a large and interdisciplinary field of study. You can achieve impressive results with machine learning and find solutions to very challenging problems. But this is only a small corner of the broader field of machine learning often called predictive modeling or predictive analytics. In this post, you will discover how to change […]
Technical topics like mathematics, physics, and even computer science are taught using a bottom-up approach. This approach involves laying out the topics in an area of study in a logical way with a natural progression in complexity and capability. The problem is, humans are not robots executing a learning program. We require motivation, excitement, and […]
The superpower of machine learning is generalization. I recently got the question: “How can a machine learning model make accurate predictions on data that it has not seen before?” The answer is generalization, and this is the capability that we seek when we apply machine learning to challenging problems. In this post, you will discover […]
There is an important difference between classification and regression problems. Fundamentally, classification is about predicting a label and regression is about predicting a quantity. I often see questions such as: How do I calculate accuracy for my regression problem? Questions like this are a symptom of not truly understanding the difference between classification and regression […]
Stories of how students and developers get started in applied machine learning are an inspiration. In this post, you will hear about Álvaro Lemos story and his transition from student to getting a machine learning internship. Including: How interest in genetic algorithms lead to the discovery of neural networks and the broader field of machine learning. How […]
