And no, it’s not in Python. Or C++.
It might not even be in a language you already know, based on how relatively unpopular it is. But if you’ve studied math or physics at university you’ve probably at least heard of it.
I’m talking about Mathematica. And since version 11, it’s been possible to train neural networks directly in Mathematica.
Yes. Seriously. Keep reading.
If you’ve ever been interested in symbolic math, let’s get it out there: there’s really no parallel. Matlab just has basic symbolic capabilities, and is not really at all comparable (although both Mathematica and Matlab share…
A tutorial on probabilistic PCA.
There’s hardly a data scientist, scientist, programmer, or even marketing director who doesn’t about PCA (principal component analysis). It’s one of the most powerful tools for dimensionality reduction. If that marketing director is collecting survey data and looking to find target consumer groups for segmentation and analyzing the competition, PCA may very well be in play.
But you may have missed one of the simplest generative models that comes from an alternate view on PCA. If we derive PCA from a graphical model perspective, we arrive at probabilistic PCA. It allows us to:
Open source iOS app for referencing face mask data
Masks are important. Choosing the right type of mask and understanding its qualifications is critical. Currently, mask information is scattered between the openFDA database, FDA websites and CDC websites.
“The Masked Manual” is a free iOS app that shows mask information compiled from openFDA, FDA websites and CDC websites. It lets you easily search for masks and see their qualifications, as well as instructions for wearing it. You can also use the camera to recognize and find your mask by scanning its packaging.
Your state’s voting power in the electoral college.
With the recent 2020 election in the United States coming to a close (or should I say closed?), the arguments about the electoral college are flaring up again. Every four years, citizens in dense population areas argue in favor of either changing or abolishing the electoral college system, citing that their votes are being discounted relative to more rural areas.
What really is your voting power in different states? I made a little Flask application that you can find hosted on Heroku here:
And where are they in machine learning?
You can find the complete code for this tutorial on GitHub here.
We will review the theory for line search methods in optimization, and end with a practical implementation.
In all optimization problems, we are ultimately interested in using a computer to find the parameters x
that minimize some function f(x)
(or -f(x)
, if it is a maximization problem). Starting from an initial starting guess x_0
, it is common to proceed in one of three ways:
From UIViewController to screenshot to social media.
You want to implement a share button that takes a screenshot from your app and let’s users share it to social media.
You cant find the complete project on GitHub here.
Let’s get started with a clean project.
Let’s start with a clean project. Add a share button to the default view controller. For the button image, you can choose square.and.arrow.up
…
A simple optimization example with Tensorflow 2.0.
I’ve often used tf.GradientTape
from StackOverflow snippets, hastily glued together. I’ve also often not used tf.GradientTape
, and the minimize
method usually appears. Finally I’ve separated the two in my mind in a simple application: optimizing a 1D function, e.g. (x-4)**2
in one scalar variable x
.
The relationship between the two approaches is actually quite simple:
minimize
method, as documented here, which performs two steps:tf.GradientTape
to calculate the gradient.apply_gradients
to apply the gradients to the parameters.
How close do you have get to deleting everything in your database before you set this up?
I’ve gotten very close — not deleting everything, but a nice large collection. Even worse, in the production database, not the development one…. Somehow it all went wrong while writing tests intended for the development database, and a collection was deleted in the production version. Luckily, this time we were able to restore the damage before chaos erupted, but next time, well….
We’ll use Cloud Functions for the backups — another approach is with GitHub Actions or GitLab CI to regularly run the…
What, when, where, why, and how?
I recently started using Docker, and with that produced an absolute pile of questions. Scraping through Google and StackOverflow for answers, here is a compilation of what I can remember learning on the first day.
Amazingly this isn’t a simple thing.
Docker Hub really just hosts the images, not the actual Dockerfile used to make them (assuming they were made from a Dockerfile). You can get lucky by heading to the page for the desired image on Docker Hub, and often you will find a link to a GitHub hosted Dockerfile.
You can also…
It’s all about those “pipeline: passed” badges.
In this guide, we will set up GitLab CI/CD for testing your Firebase functions.
Let’s start with the setup of the tests. Assuming you have two projects: a production project and a development project with ID <YOUR_DEV_PROJECT_ID>
, I’ll assume you want to run the tests on your development project. I’ll also assume your directory is organized as follows:
firebase.json
functions/package.json
...
functions/src/index.ts
functions/src/... other .ts functions
...
functions/test/index.test.ts
functions/test/... other .test.ts tests
By default, tests are done with the mocha
framework. Other guides exist to use jest
. …
Practical coding publications that fill in the gaps