This is the continuation of my series converting the samples found in Machine Learning in Action from Python to F#. After starting on a nice and steady pace, I hit a speed bump with Chapter 6, dedicated to the Support Vector Machine algorithm. The math is more involved than the previous algorithms, and the original Python implementation is very procedural , which both slowed down the conversion to a more functional style. Anyways, I am now at a good point to share progress. The current version uses Sequent[...]

I have been obsessing about the following idea lately – what if I could run a FSI session from within Excel? The motivation behind this is double. First, one thing Excel is good at is creating and formatting charts. If I could use F# for data manipulation, and Excel for data visualization, I would be a happy camper. Then, I think F# via FSI could provide an interesting alternative for Excel automation. I’d much rather leverage existing .NET libraries to, say, grab data from the internet, than write some VB[...]

I am still working my way through “Machine Learning in Action”, converting the samples from Python to F#. I am currently in the middle of chapter 6, dedicated to Support Vector Machines, which has given me more trouble than the previous ones. This post will be sharing my current progress: the code I have so far is a working translation of the naïve SVM implementation, presented in the first half of the chapter. We’ll get to kernels, and the full Platt SMO algorithm in a later post – today will be solely di[...]

The Kaggle/StackOverflow contest officially closed a few days ago, which makes it a perfect time to have a miniature retrospective on that experience. The objective of the contest was to write an algorithm to predict whether a StackOverflow question would be closed by moderators, and the reason why. The contest was announced just a couple of days before what was supposed to be 4 weeks of computer-free vacation travelling around Europe. Needless to say, a quick change of plans followed; I am a big fan of S[...]

This post is to be filed in the “useless but fun” category. A friend of mine was doing some Hadoopy stuff a few days ago, experimenting with rather large sparse matrices and their products. Long story short, we ended up wondering how sparse the product of 2 sparse matrices should be. A sparse matrix is a matrix which is primarily filled with zeros. The product of two matrices involves computing the dot product of each row of the first one, with each column of the second one. There is clearly a relationship[...]