In our previous post, we began exploring Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) using Math.NET and F#, and showed how this linear algebra technique can be used to “extract” the core information of a dataset and construct a reduced version of the dataset with limited loss of information. Today, we’ll pursue our excursion in Chapter 14 of Machine Learning in Action, and look at how this can be used to build a collaborative recommendation engine. We’ll follow the approach outlined by the book, starting first with[...]

Last Thursday, I gave a talk at the Bay.NET user group in Berkeley, introducing F# to C# developers. First off, I have to thank everybody who came – you guys were great, lots of good questions, nice energy, I had a fantastic time! My goal was to highlight why I think F# is awesome, and of course this had to include a Type Provider demo, one of the most amazing features of F# 3.0. So I went ahead, and demoed Tomas Petricek’s World Bank Type Provider, and Howard Mansell’s R Type Provider – together. The prom[...]

My trajectory through “Machine Learning in Action” is becoming more unpredictable as we go – this time, rather than completing our last episode on K-means clustering (we’ll get back to it later), I’ll make another jump directly to Chapter 14, which is dedicated to Singular Value Decomposition, and convert the example from Python to F#. The chapter illustrates how Singular Value Decomposition (or SVD in short) can be used to build a collaborative recommendation engine. We will follow the chapter pretty clos[...]

Mondrian is one of those modern painters whose work everyone recognizes, even though few people will quote his name. He also happens to be one of my favorite artists – in spite of their simple geometric structure, I find his pieces strangely beautiful: “Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow”, from Wikipedia I have been hard at work on some pretty dry stuff lately, and needed a bit of a change of pace, and ended up spending a couple of hours coding a simple Mondrianizer in F#: give it a picture, and it w[...]

Recently, I had a few interesting discussions on F# code readability. One argument I often hear about F# is that by virtue of its succinctness, it increases the signal-to-noise ratio. I certainly found this to be true: when the entire code fits on your screen, and you don’t have to scroll around to figure out what is going on, navigating a code base becomes significantly simpler. Relatedly, because the F# syntax is so much lighter than C#, some of my coding habits evolved. I stick to the “one public type p[...]