Technology choices in data-driven products are, as you would expect, largely directed by the type and amount of data. The first and most crucial decision to make is whether the data will be processed in a batch or streaming fashion.
Read moreData Science has become an important part of any business because it provides a competitive advantage. Very early on, Amazon’s data on book purchases allowed them to deliver personalised recommendations whilst customers were browsing their site. Their main competitor in the US at the time was Borders, who mainly operated in physical stores. This physicality prevented them from seamlessly providing customers with personalised recommendations [1]. This example highlights how strategic business decisions and data science are inextricably linked.
Read moreAbstract We live in a world where decisions are being made by software. From mortgage applications to driverless vehicles, the results can be life-changing. But the benefits of automation are clear. If businesses use data science to automate decisions they will become more productive and more profitable. So the question becomes: how can we be sure that these algorithms make the best decisions? How can we prove that an autonomous vehicle will make the right decision when life depends on it?
Read moreA current project required a list of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for all regions for use in terraform. I couldn’t find a script to do this for me, so here you will find one that uses the aws cli, jq and a bit of Bash.
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Dimensionality Reduction - Principal Component Analysis Welcome! This workshop is from Winder.ai. Sign up to receive more free workshops, training and videos. Sometimes data has redundant dimensions. For example, when predicting weight from height data you would expect that information about their eye colour provides no predictive power. In this simple case we can simply remove that feature from the data. With more complex data it is usual to have combinations of features that provide predictive power.
Read moreDistance Measures for Similarity Matching with Large Datasets Today I had an interesting question from a client that was using a distance metric for similarity matching. The problem I face is that given one vector v and a list of vectors X how do I calculate the Euclidean distance between v and each vector in X in the most efficient way possible in order to get the top matching vectors? A distance measure is the measure of how similar one observation is compared to a set of other observations.
Read moreDimensionality and domain knowledge Is it right to use the same distance measure for all features? E.g. height and sex? CPU and Disk space? Some features will have more of an effect than others due to their scales. ??? In this version of the algorithm all features are used in the distance calculation. This treats all features the same. So a measure of height has the same effect as the measure of sex.
Read moreMore than just similarities Classification: Predict the same class as the nearest observations Regression: Predict the same value as the nearest observations ??? Remember for classification tasks, we want to predict a class for a new observation. What we could do is predict a class that is the same as the nearest neighbour. Simple! For regression tasks, we need to predict a value. Again, we could use the value of the nearest neighbour!
Read moreThis section introduces the idea of “similarity”. Why?: Simplicity Many business tasks require a measure of “similarity” Works well Business reasoning Why would businesses want to use a measure of similarity? What business problems map well to similarity classifiers? Find similar companies on a CRM Find similar people in an online dating app Find similar configurations of machines in a data centre Find pictures of cats that look like this cat Recommend products to buy from similar customers Find similar wines Similarity What is similarity?
Read moreValidation curve One simple method of visualising overfitting is with a validation curve, (a.k.a fitting curve). This is a plot of a score (e.g. accuracy) verses some parameter in the model. Let’s compare the make_circles dataset again and vary the SVM->RBF->gamma value. ??? Performance of the SVM->RBF algorithm when altering the parameters of the RBF. We can see that we are underfitting at low values of \(\gamma\). So we can make the model more complex by allowing the SVM to fit smaller and smaller kernels.
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