annoy

• Regression with 2-means clustering Annoy (non-scientific)

  So apparently Annoy is now splitting points by using the centroids of 2 means clustering. It is claimed that it provides better results for ANN search, however, how does this impact regression? Purely out of curiosity, I plugged a new point splitting function and generated a new set of points.

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• Regression with Annoy (cont’d)

  After a year and half, a lot of things changed, and annoy also changed the splitting strategy too. However, I always wanted to do a proper follow up to the original post, where I compared boosting to Annoy. I still remember the reason I started that (flawed) experiment was because I found boosting easy.

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• Quick experiment, boosting vs annoy

  While following through the Statistical Learning course, I came across this part on doing regression with boosting. Then reading through the material, and going through it makes me wonder, the same method may be adapted to Erik Bernhardsson‘s annoy algorithm.

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• Approximate Neighbour Search in Multiple Dimensions

  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.

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• Re-implementing Approximate Nearest Neighbour Search

  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.

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• Information Retrieving with ….. a lot of libraries

  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.

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Random Posts

• Quick Hack: Terminal Appearing from Right

  It is useful to have the terminal around whenever I code. However, while real screen estate is finite, having a terminal further limiting the amount of information that can be displayed at the same time. The problem with the terminal is that I don’t really need it all the time, so I usually find it buried under a group of windows.

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• Over-doing a task: reading CSV file in #golang

  I was invited to try Go (the programming language, not that board game) a few months ago, however I didn’t complete back then. The main reason was because it felt raw, compared to other languages that I know a fair bit better (for example Ruby). There was no much syntatic sugar around, and getting some work done with it feels “dirty”.

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• Re-organizing my MacVim configuration

  It is very difficult to like the way vim handle plugins by default, so I was really thrilled to find out about pathogen when a geek I followed tweeted about it. It took me some time to actually re-organize my current configuration to this new format. Then I thought why not reorganize my .vimrc as well, as my current version looks a bit cryptic after a while.

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• What’s so difficult about HTML?

  I am not going to waste time telling stories that inspire this post, as most people would have already heard something similar constantly. This is not a mythbuster kinda post, so don’t expect a scientific proof to the answer of the question. Instead, through this post, I hope to break the impression that claims composing a HTML document is difficult.

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• Overdoing a task part 2: csv-to-json

  This is the second part of the golang learning rant log. Previously on (note (code cslai)) I managed to make each line in the CSV into a hash map. So today I am going to make it into JSON Lines.

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