You do not need to know statistics before you can start learning and applying machine learning. You can start today. Nevertheless, knowing some statistics can be very helpful to understand the language used in machine learning. Knowing some statistics will eventually be required when you want to start making strong claims about your results. In […]
We all know the satisfaction of running an analysis and seeing the results come back the way we want them to: 80% accuracy; 85%; 90%? The temptation is strong just to turn to the Results section of the report we’re writing, and put the numbers in. But wait: as always, it’s not that straightforward. Succumbing […]
Edward Raff is the author of the Java Machine Learning library called JSAT (which is an acronym for Java Statistical Analysis Tool). Edward has implemented many algorithms in creating this library and I recently reached out to him and asked what advice he could give to beginners implementing machine learning algorithms from scratch. In this post […]
What does it take to do well in competitive machine learning? To really dig into this question, you need to dig into the people that do well. In 2010 I participated in a Kaggle competition to predict the outcome of chess games in the future. It was a fascinating problem because it required you to […]
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 […]
R is the most popular platform for applied machine learning. When you want to get serious with applied machine learning you will find your way into R. It is very powerful because so many machine learning algorithms are provided. A problem is that the algorithms are all provided by third parties, which makes their usage […]
R is perhaps one of the most powerful and most popular platforms for statistical programming and applied machine learning. When you get serious about machine learning, you will find your way into R. In this post, you will discover what R is, where it came from and some of its most important features. Let’s get […]
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 […]
R is a powerful platform for data analysis and machine learning. It is my main workhorse for things like competitions and consulting work. The reason is the large amounts of powerful algorithms available, all on the one platform. In this post I want to point out some resources you can use to get started in […]
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 […]
