Notes on codes, projects and everything
This is the year I kept digging my old undergraduate notes on Statistics for work. First was my brief attempt wearing the Data Scientist performing ANOVA test to see if there’s correlation between pairs of variables. Then just recently I was tasked to analyze a survey result for a social audit project.
(more…)I finally put in some time and effort learning myself a bit of Rust. Though I am still struggling with ownership and lifetimes (which is essentially everything about the language, to be honest), I find it more interesting compared to Golang, which is relatively boring, though being functional (no pun intended). While learning the language, the one thing I came across often is the Option
enum, then I remembered that I read something about Monad.
I saw this article from alistapart, which is about Javascript’s prototypal object orientation. So the article mentioned Douglas Crawford, and I was immediately reminded about my struggle in understanding the language itself. Back then I used to also refer to his site for a lot of notes in Javascript. So I went back to have a quick read, and found this article that discusses the similarity between Javascript and Lisp.
The Nand2Tetris part I at coursera is very much my first completed course. It was so fun to actually work through the material and it feels amazing to know how simple it is to actually build a computer from scratch. While it is simple, it doesn’t mean the course itself is easy though. I was struggling to get the CPU wired up properly that I spent two to three days just to get it working.
This post is purely based on my own speculation as there’s no experiment on real-life data to actually back the arguments. I am currently trying to document down a plan for my experiment(s) on recommender system (this reminds me that I have not release the Flickr data collection tool :/) and my supervisor advised to write a paragraph or two on some of the key things. Since he is not going to read it, so I might as well just post it here as a note.
Recently I switched my search code to Annoy because the input dataset is huge (7.5mil records with 20k dictionary count). It wasn’t without issues though, however I would probably talk about it next time. In order to figure out what each parameters meant, I spent some time watching through the talk given by the author @fulhack.
In the previous post, I re-implemented Annoy in 2D with some linear algebra maths. Then I spent some time going through some tutorial on vectors, and expanded the script to handle data in 3D and more. So instead of finding gradient, the perpendicular line in the middle of two points, I construct a plane, and find the distance between it and points to construct the tree.
It is very much expected that there will be endless stream of new (and often times better) tools introduced to solve the same set of problems. While I am slowly resuming my programming work, and in the process of reviving my very much dead postgrad project, I found some alternative to the tools I had used in the past. I suppose I shall just jot them down here so that there’s a reference for later use.
Implementing a Information Retrieval system is a fun thing to do. However, doing it efficiently is not (at least to me). So my first few attempts didn’t really end well (mostly uses just Go/golang with some bash tricks here and there, with or without a database). Then I jumped back to Python, which I am more familiar with and was very surprised with all the options available. So I started with Pandas and Scikit-learn combo.