Apologies to designers and UX researchers, to whom this is probably pretty boring. Like most content on this blog, this post is aimed at data scientists. The following question caught a couple of my colleagues off guard: If you type "lisb" into Google, how are the predicted searches rendered? Option 1: lisbon lisbon portugal lisbon [...]
elasticsearch shards and small data
In Elasticsearch, IDF values are calculated per shard (the article is glibly titled "Relevance is Broken"). The docs stress that this isn't a cause for concern: In practice, this is not a problem. The differences between local and global IDF diminish the more documents that you add to the index. With real-world volumes of data, [...]
solving SAT in python
SAT is hard, but there are algorithms that tend to do okay empirically. I recently learned about the Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland (DPLL) procedure and rolled up a short Python implementation. (I can't get no) satisfaction A boolean formula is called "satisfiable" if you can assign truth values to the underlying atoms in such a way that the [...]
active learning
Active learning is a subfield of machine learning that probably doesn't receive as much attention as it should. The fundamental idea behind active learning is that some instances are more informative than others, and if a learner can choose the instances it trains on, it can learn faster than it would on an unbiased random [...]
building a term-document matrix in spark
A year-old stack overflow question that I'm able to answer? This is like spotting Bigfoot. I'm going to assume access to nothing more than a spark context. Let's start by parallelizing some familiar sentences. The first step is to tokenize our documents and cache the resulting RDD. In practice, by which I mean the game, [...]
visualizing piero scaruffi’s music database
Since the mid-1980s, Piero Scaruffi has written essays on countless topics, and published them all for free on the internet - which he helped develop. You can learn more about him (and pretty much anything else that might interest you) on his legendary website. I was introduced to the site when a friend began referring [...]
the lowest form of wit: modelling sarcasm on reddit
A while back Kaggle introduced a database containing all the comments that were posted to reddit in May 2015. (The data is 30Gb in SQLite format and you can still download it here). Kagglers were encouraged to try NLP experiments with the data. One of the more interesting responses was a script that queried and [...]
