I currently do a lot of Office type automation work where I scan a bunch of email from exchange, download excel attachments, open and transform a bunch of data from them, reconcile these against databases using FLinq, produce graphs and charts with the results using FSharpChart, and so forth. (p.s - as a side note, F# is awesome at doing this kind of thing, I can knock all kinds of stuff out super fast.  p.p.s - Active patterns with Excel = win) As anyone who has done any office automation will know, clean[...]

I recently completed the Coursera Social Network Analysis class. This was my first time taking a Coursera class. In this post, I will describe my experience with Coursera generally, and review the Social Network Analysis class in particular. Along with several of my Spruce Media colleagues, I took Martin Odersky’s Functional Programming Principles in Scala class [...]

I am still working my way through “Machine Learning in Action”, converting the samples from Python to F#. I am currently in the middle of chapter 6, dedicated to Support Vector Machines, which has given me more trouble than the previous ones. This post will be sharing my current progress: the code I have so far is a working translation of the naïve SVM implementation, presented in the first half of the chapter. We’ll get to kernels, and the full Platt SMO algorithm in a later post – today will be solely di[...]

The Kaggle/StackOverflow contest officially closed a few days ago, which makes it a perfect time to have a miniature retrospective on that experience. The objective of the contest was to write an algorithm to predict whether a StackOverflow question would be closed by moderators, and the reason why. The contest was announced just a couple of days before what was supposed to be 4 weeks of computer-free vacation travelling around Europe. Needless to say, a quick change of plans followed; I am a big fan of S[...]

This post is to be filed in the “useless but fun” category. A friend of mine was doing some Hadoopy stuff a few days ago, experimenting with rather large sparse matrices and their products. Long story short, we ended up wondering how sparse the product of 2 sparse matrices should be. A sparse matrix is a matrix which is primarily filled with zeros. The product of two matrices involves computing the dot product of each row of the first one, with each column of the second one. There is clearly a relationship[...]