It's all about regression | Weekly Report 11

25 Sep 2016 . category: report . Comments
#data science #fitness #pilani #philosophy

Fail at something you love, rather than be successful at something you hate!

My weekly report - from the 19th of September to the 25th of September. A fairly productive week; felt good working on a couple machine learning problems.

I’d to submit an assignment for my Philosophy course, centred around the theme of “Philosophy of Technology”. I spent around one and a half days reading up on Transhumanism and Singularitarianism – Ray Kurzweil is a genius at his work, no wonder he’s Google’s Chief Futurist!

I watched this two-hour feature film “Transcendence”, which asks serious questions about AI Ethics post Artificial Super Intelligence. Johnny Depp makes the AI look pretty cool – Expect a blog on my perspective on the Singularity!

Regarding my data science projects, I’ve been playing around with a Kaggle dataset to predict house prices based on various factors like Flat Type and whether the house has a pool! It is a typical regression problem, and I’ve already learnt a couple of concepts like the “Boruta variable importance”. I’m currently reading up on tuning XGBoost for improved performance.

I’m also participating in another Regression problem on AnalyticsVidhya, a week-long competition. The competition is about predicting the footfall in parks on certain dates, given various environmental variables. I’ve touched the top 15 with simple feature engineering and a strong random forest – Feature Engineering is going to take me higher! We’re just getting started!

Talking about my evening runs, I achieved a new high yesterday – 5 Kilometres at a 5:11 pace! I’m trying to stretch my limits day-by-day, so that by mid-October a 10K run is commonplace.

The drone arrived! The drone flew! And it crashed :(

It is currently stuck on the top of a tree, and the rescue mission is underway!

That’s it folks!

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