Programmers learn by implementing techniques from scratch. It is a type of learning that is perhaps slower than other types of learning, but fuller in that all of the micro decisions involved become intimate. The implementation is owned from head to tail. In this post we take a close look at Joel Grus popular book […]
How Do I Get Started In Machine Learning? I’m a developer. I have read a book or some posts on machine learning. I have watched some of the Coursera machine learning course. I still don’t know how to get started… Does this sound familiar? The most common question I’m asked by developers on my newsletter is: How do […]
If You Knew Which Algorithm or Algorithm Configuration To Use, You Would Not Need To Use Machine Learning There is no best machine learning algorithm or algorithm parameters. I want to cure you of this type of silver bullet mindset. I see these questions a lot, even daily: Which is the best machine learning algorithm? What […]
Feature engineering is an informal topic, but one that is absolutely known and agreed to be key to success in applied machine learning. In creating this guide I went wide and deep and synthesized all of the material I could. You will discover what feature engineering is, what problem it solves, why it matters, how […]
Are you a Java programmer and looking to get started or practice machine learning? Writing programs that make use of machine learning is the best way to learn machine learning. You can write the algorithms yourself from scratch, but you can make a lot more progress if you leverage an existing open source library. In […]
Online communities are invaluable in machine learning, regardless of your skill level. The reason is that, like programming, you never stop learning. You simply cannot know everything, there are always new algorithms, new data and new combinations to discover and practice. Communities help. You can get your questions answered, learn by answering other peoples questions […]
David Mimno is an assistant professor in the Information Sciences department at Cornell University. He has a background and interest in Natural Language Processing (NLP), specifically topic modeling. Notably, he is the chief maintainer of MALLET, the Java-based NLP library. I recently came across a blog post by David titled “Advice for students of machine […]
Louis Dorard has released his book titled Bootstrapping Machine Learning. It’s a book that provides a gentle introduction to the field of machine learning targeted at developers and start-ups with a focus on prediction APIs. I just finished reading this book and I want to share some my thoughts. If you are interested, I have […]
Python is a very popular language for machine learning. The machine learning libraries and frameworks in Python (especially around the SciPy stack) are maturing quickly. They may not be as feature rich as R, but they are robust enough for small to medium scale production implementation. If you are a Python programmer looking to get […]
Need Help Getting Started with Applied Machine Learning? These are the Step-by-Step Guides that You’ve Been Looking For! What do you want help with? The most common question I’m asked is: “how do I get started?” My best advice for getting started in machine learning is broken down into a 5-step process: Step 1: Adjust Mindset. […]
