You could take a look at some traditional stat anslyses, like Cluster Analysis, and for a visual representation, try Multidimensional Scaling. These would save you a lot of time. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel, but Big Data seems intent upon ignoring the vast historical knowkedge regarding statistics, psychometrics, and Measurement Theory. Believe me- if you have a question on how to proceed with an analysis, multivariate statistics is likely to have several accaeptable answers. When I see people "discovering" a "new" analysis that was thoroughly described a half a century ago, it makes me moan in despair.

Feature extraction has gained increasing attention in the field of machine learning, as in order to detect patterns, extract information, or predict future observations from big data, the urge of informative features is crucial. The process of extracting features is highly linked to dimensionality reduction as it implies the transformation of the data from a sparse high-dimensional space, to higher level meaningful abstractions. This dissertation employs Neural Networks for distributed paragraph representations, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation to capture higher level features of paragraph vectors. Although Neural Networks for distributed paragraph representations are considered the state of the art for extracting paragraph vectors, we show that a quick topic analysis model such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation can provide meaningful features too. We evaluate the two methods on the CMU Movie Summary Corpus, a collection of 25,203 movie plot summaries extracted from Wikipedia. Finally, for both approaches, we use K-Nearest Neighbors to discover similar movies, and plot the projected representations using T-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding to depict the context similarities. These similarities, expressed as movie distances, can be used for movies recommendation. The recommended movies of this approach are compared with the recommended movies from IMDB, which use a collaborative filtering recommendation approach, to show that our two models could constitute either an alternative or a supplementary recommendation approach.

Similarity metrics are a core component of many information retrieval and machine learning systems. In this work we propose a method capable of learning a similarity metric from data equipped with a binary relation. By considering only the similarity constraints, and initially ignoring the features, we are able to learn target vectors for each instance using one of several appropriately designed loss functions. A regression model can then be constructed that maps novel feature vectors to the same target vector space, resulting in a feature extractor that computes vectors for which a predefined metric is a meaningful measure of similarity. We present results on both multiclass and multi-label classification datasets that demonstrate considerably faster convergence, as well as higher accuracy on the majority of the intrinsic evaluation tasks and all extrinsic evaluation tasks.

Researchers often summarize their work in the form of posters. Posters provide a coherent and efficient way to convey core ideas from scientific papers. Generating a good scientific poster, however, is a complex and time consuming cognitive task, since such posters need to be readable, informative, and visually aesthetic. In this paper, for the first time, we study the challenging problem of learning to generate posters from scientific papers. To this end, a data-driven framework, that utilizes graphical models, is proposed. Specifically, given content to display, the key elements of a good poster, including panel layout and attributes of each panel, are learned and inferred from data. Then, given inferred layout and attributes, composition of graphical elements within each panel is synthesized. To learn and validate our model, we collect and make public a Poster-Paper dataset, which consists of scientific papers and corresponding posters with exhaustively labelled panels and attributes. Qualitative and quantitative results indicate the effectiveness of our approach.

I am a data scientist, big data engineer, and full stack software engineer. For my masters thesis I worked on brain-computer interfaces using near-infrared spectroscopy. These assist non-verbal and non-mobile persons communicate with their family and caregivers. I have worked in online advertising and digital media as both a data scientist and big data engineer, and built various high-throughput web services around said data. I've created new big data pipelines using Hadoop/Pig/MapReduce. I've created machine learning models to predict click-through rate, news feed recommender systems using linear regression, Bayesian Bandits, and collaborative filtering and validated the results using A/B testing.

XGBoost is a recent implementation of Boosted Trees. It is a machine learning algorithm that yields great results on recent Kaggle competitions. I decided to install it on my computers to give it a try. Installation on OSX was straightforward using these instructions. Installation on Windows was not as straightforward.

We study nonconvex finite-sum problems and analyze stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods for them. SVRG and related methods have recently surged into prominence for convex optimization given their edge over stochastic gradient descent (SGD); but their theoretical analysis almost exclusively assumes convexity. In contrast, we prove non-asymptotic rates of convergence (to stationary points) of SVRG for nonconvex optimization, and show that it is provably faster than SGD and gradient descent. We also analyze a subclass of nonconvex problems on which SVRG attains linear convergence to the global optimum. We extend our analysis to mini-batch variants of SVRG, showing (theoretical) linear speedup due to mini-batching in parallel settings.

Topic models (e.g., pLSA, LDA, SLDA) have been widely used for segmenting imagery. These models are confined to crisp segmentation. Yet, there are many images in which some regions cannot be assigned a crisp label (e.g., transition regions between a foggy sky and the ground or between sand and water at a beach). In these cases, a visual word is best represented with partial memberships across multiple topics. To address this, we present a partial membership latent Dirichlet allocation (PM-LDA) model and associated parameter estimation algorithms. Experimental results on two natural image datasets and one SONAR image dataset show that PM-LDA can produce both crisp and soft semantic image segmentations; a capability existing methods do not have.

The distribution of the outcome variable quality is a bit funky – the values are mostly 5 and 6 (how would you check this?). This could get a bit irksome later on, so go ahead and recode the quality scores into something more convenient. One idea would be to label wines as being either high quality (e.g. if their score is 6 or higher) or low quality (if the score is 6 or lower).

Linear regression is perhaps one of the most well known and well understood algorithms in statistics and machine learning. In this post you will discover the linear regression algorithm, how it works and how you can best use it in on your machine learning projects. You do not need to know any statistics or linear algebra to understand linear regression. This is a gentle high-level introduction to the technique to give you enough background to be able to use it effectively on your own problems. Linear Regression for Machine Learning Photo by Nicolas Raymond, some rights reserved.