An Introduction
to Machine Learning

(with examples, not equations)

These slides: hourann.com/2014/pds

Hourann Bosci @daBosq

Let’s talk about the weather!

Brolly

Another example we’re all familiar with ...

Collaborative filtering

wired.com/2009/09/how-the-netflix-prize-was-won

The secret sauce for both BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos and The Ensemble was collaboration between diverse ideas, and not in some touchy-feely, unquantifiable, “when people work together things are better” sort of way. The top two teams beat the challenge by combining teams and their algorithms into more complex algorithms incorporating everybody’s work. The more people joined, the more the resulting team’s score would increase.

wired.com/2009/09/how-the-netflix-prize-was-won

nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry, according to an employee who participated in the conversation.

“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”

nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html

Now we’re in the land of ...

Regression

BuildTrue

Simplify one side to get ...

Classification

research.google.com/en/archive/unsupervised_icml2012.pdf

wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network

When computer scientists at Google ... built a neural network of 16,000 computer processors with one billion connections and let it browse YouTube, it did what many web users might do — it began to look for cats.

wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network