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[...]

Suppose you need to write a script that finds n files, all called based on some pattern, say “c:\temp\my_file_x.txt”, where “x” is replaced by a range of numbers [1..30] for instance, reads the content of these files and glues them together. Suppose also that the files are very small, so you can keep them in […]

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[...]

As the three of us embarked on this new data-mining project, we were the data scientist, the manager and the developer, who knew nothing about visualizations. We didn’t even want to do any visuals at first. Then someone stumbled across the New York Times Obama Budget visual and the wheels started spinning. Pretty soon we […]

Figure a blog without pictures or conversations is just boring, so, here it is. Lately, I have been dealing a lot with data visualization. This was a brand new area for me and while we do use F# for data extraction, all of the front end is done using d3, an amazing toolkit by Mike […]