[Noisebridge-discuss] Machine Learning seminars?

Josh Myer josh at joshisanerd.com
Wed Dec 10 20:27:13 UTC 2008


Would there be any interest in talks on machine learning topics?

I was thinking of walking a group through an implementation of Naive
Bayes (a classifier, like the ones used for spam detection) to test
the waters.  If there's interest, I'd then like to move on to
discussion of other, more advanced things.

Ideally, it would be awesome to put together the "arduino for ML,"
something that makes ML ideas and implementations accessible to
non-specialists.


Possible source materials:

1.) Andrew Moore's Statistical Data Mining Tutorials

http://www.autonlab.org/tutorials/

Fun, informative, but missing a little bit since they're lecture
slides.  I love these slide decks, but they're slightly hard-core.


2.) "Programming Collective Intelligence" by Toby Segaran

http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321/

It's a fun book, but a little shallow for serious practice.  It's also
light on things outside collaborative filtering; collaborative
filtering is of limited value for our purposes.  Still a good,
readable introduction to key ideas, though.

3.) Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques by 
     Witten and Frank

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Practical-Techniques-Management/dp/0120884070/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228940709&sr=8-1

I rather like this book, but it's a little heavy for introductions.

I'm also open to suggestions from others; my background is mostly
second-hand from practitioners.
-- 
Josh Myer   650.248.3796
  josh at joshisanerd.com



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