A programmer will always aim to take out human repetition. Usually, this means a small investment in time leads to a much larger windfall later when the magic happens with the click of a button (or more likely a command sent to the shell). Sometimes, however, the opposite happens.
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MOOC
Data Analysis Assignment 2
I just turned in Assignment 2 for my Data Analysis Course so I can now share it on here (Unfortunately, I’ve been warned that people have been plagiarizing so I’ve removed my files to prevent cheating… which ironically I did not list as a challenge for a MOOC below, but should be added). In this assignment, we were given sensor data from the Samsung Galaxy SII recorded while users performed specific activities. The goal was to develop a model on some training data to predict what activity the test subjects are performing. As usual, I wish I had more time to spend on it because I always feel like there is more I can add. Using random forests, I got a misclassification error rate of about 5% on the test subjects. Not too shabby, but at some point I would like to compare it to other models such as SVMs or Neural networks. Continue reading
Coursera
One aspect of my New Year’s resolution for this year was to hop on the Coursera (and other MOOCs) bandwagon. I started a course last year called Probabilistic Graphical Models, which was fascinating for the one week I stuck with it. But, it required about 15 hours (too many) per week. This time around, I decided to start with baby steps. Take a few short refreshers to get into the habit and then expand from there. But there’s just too many awesome courses available right now! Continue reading