I really don't like the arrogance coming through the writing style, especially given how clear it is the author has at best basic working knowledge of ML.
Never mind the fact that k-means is ML 101 and the $500M company is likely using more sophisticated ones, the fact that he says the following tells me he's just reading tutorials and plugging data into libraries (which is fine but not with this tone of know-it-all writing):
"I played with the number of clusters, and the one that allowed me to get the most significant clusters was 6 (this was a trial and error approach, for brevity I’ll report just the final outcome)."
Anyone who has studied clustering knows you would at the very least do a scree plot here. You can defer to intuition but there's more to it than running kmeans and claiming you've reverse-engineered a $500M company.
I think this may have something to do with Jeremy Howard's time as president there - I remember watching a few of his tutorials a couple of years ago when he was still at Kaggle and he was really into C#.
I spoke to some Uber drivers in Johannesburg (also insane murder rate) and they said the same thing - things got dangerous when they started having to carry cash.
Worst thing is they were sold on becoming Uber drivers with the promise that it would be less dangerous because it was cashless...
I threw all of the above plus CNNs at MNIST problem and boosted decision trees outperformed CNNs.
Granted if I tuned both perfectly, CNNs probably would have outperformed but with defaults and a small amount of parameter search, boosting worked best.
I threw all of the above plus CNNs at MNIST problem and boosted decision trees outperformed CNNs.
Granted if I tuned both perfectly, CNNs probably would have outperformed but with defaults and a small amount of parameter search, boosting worked best.
My back and shoulders have been hurting more and more (I'm only 27!) and it took me way too long to accept that slouching over my laptop was causing it.
Putting my laptop on a pile of books and using an external keyboard and mouse made a HUGE difference and my posture has improved significantly after just a couple of months.
I recently bought a Roost laptop stand which is great for travel and looks like spy gear but it is a bit pricey and a stack of books does the job too.
Check out d3.js - building a GIS app myself on top of d3 and it's really powerful and runs in the browser. Will have to do the GIS calcs server side and just use d3 to render but that plays really well with PostGIS...
You should start with "Introduction to Statistical Learning" which is the baby brother of "Elements of Statistics Learning" (arguably THE reference book) - it's easy to follow and has examples in R, a functional language.
Super easy to call R scripts from python - can use rpy2 to send dataframes from R to pandas or can just run an R script that outputs a csv to a folder and then read that in python...
It's a wrapper around both D3.js and crossfilter.js and makes building linked interactive charts / dashboards really easy.