It looks like this summer will be my strangest vacation in a while – I’ll be taking a F# road trip of sorts in August, talking about F# at user groups all over the United States. How this crazy plan took shape exactly I am not quite sure in retrospect, but I am really looking forward to meeting all the local communities – this will be fun! As of July 13th, here is the plan: July 31, Sacramento: “Coding Dojo: a gentle introduction to Machine Learning with F#” August 8, Houston: “An Introduction to F# for th[...]

Besides having one of the coolest names around, Random Forest is an interesting machine learning algorithm, for a few reasons. It is applicable to a large range of classification problems, isn’t prone to over-fitting, can produce good quality metrics as a side-effect of the training process itself, and is very suitable for parallelization. For all these reasons, I thought it would be interesting to try it out in F#. The current implementation I will be discussing below works, but isn’t production ready (y[...]

I just completed the Coursera Machine Learning class this week, and enjoyed the experience very much. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: getting a high-quality class, for free, wherever you are, at your own pace, is pretty amazing, and I can put up with a sometimes flaky video player for that. Every quarter in college, I would agonize over what limited number of classes I should take, thinking that I might not be able to take that class ever again once I graduated, and Coursera is awesome for that – now[...]

I got interested in the following question lately: given a data set of examples with some continuous-valued features and discrete classes, what’s a good way to reduce the continuous features into a set of discrete values? What makes this question interesting? One very specific reason is that some machine learning algorithms, like Decision Trees, require discrete features. As a result, potentially informative data has to be discarded. For example, consider the Titanic dataset: we know the age of passengers [...]

Last week, we had our first Coding Dojo at SFSharp.org, the San Francisco F# group – and it was great! A few people in the group had mentioned that at that point they were already convinced F# was a great language, and that what they wanted was help getting started writing actual code, so I figured this would be a good format to try out. What I wanted was something fun, something cool people could realistically achieve under 2 hours. I settled for one of the Kaggle introduction problems, a classic of Machi[...]