Wednesday, November 14, 2012

The beginning and my current project

 My current project is to gain knowledge on machine learning. I am working my way through  the free Stanford course on Machine learning. The course recommends Matlab or Octave. I don't have access to Matlab and cannot for the life of me figure out how to download Octave and make it work on my machine. So I've decided to use Python. Python is a free, open source programming language. I already have some experience with this language. It can be used to solve math and statistics problems especially with  Numpy, Scipy and Matplotlib.

What I have been finding as I take this course is that I have enough theoretical math and statistics knowledge to understand what is being taught. But as an inexperienced programmer, it is very hard to  do the assignments. The Numpy and Matplotlib manuals are in draft form and it is sometimes very hard to figure out how to do things. I did find several bloggers who have posted on using Python for different applications. I found one blogger who had several posts on the problems from the Standford course. Take a look at this post.  Unfortunately, this code did not work for me. It never does.  People will write code that solves a problem that I want to solve. But when I try to use the code, it doesn't work and then I don't know how to fix it. I think this is because I am so inexperienced, I can't tell which steps were skipped. That's why  I think that other newbie, inexperienced programmers may benefit from my explanations.

So that's why I'm here. My next post will be on how to turn the abstract mathematical matrix equations in Newton's method (Problem set #1) into concrete equations that can be programmed for Python. Future posts will deal with how *%&@ hard it is to use matricies in Python.

By the way, I learned to program Python by taking this course. Then I increased my knowledge by using Python to solve the math problems posted at Project Euler. If you're a math geek and you haven't tried this site, you are really missing something.

No comments:

Post a Comment