How to Improve Machine Learning Performance? Lessons from Andrew Ng

You have worked for weeks on building your machine learning system and the performance is not something you are satisfied with. You think of multiple ways to improve your algorithm's performance, viz, collect more data, add more hidden units, add more layers, change the network architecture, change the basic algorithm etc. But which one of these will give the best improvement on your system? You can either try them all, invest a lot of time and find out what works for you. You can use the following tips from Ng's experience.