Learning Algorithm and Saving Data in Software

Question

I'm coming from a web-development background and I am wondering how I would make a learning algorithm in Java/C++. Not so much the algorithm part, but making the program "remember" what it learned from the previous day. I would think something like saving a file, but I suspect their might be an easier way. Apologies if this question is just over the top stupid. Thanks.

Answer 1

I think that would depend a bit on the problem domain. You might want to store learned "facts" or "relationships" in a DB so that they can be easily searched. If you are training a neural network, then you'd probably just dump the network state to a file. In general, I think once you have a mechanism that does the learning, the appropriate storage representation will be relatively apparent.

Maybe if you can flesh out your plan on what kind of learning you'd like to implement, people can provide more guidance on what the implementation should look like, including the state storage.

Answer 2

If you want to access and save large amounts of data maybe a database would work well. This would allow you to structure the data and look it up in an easier manner. I'm not too well versed on the subject but I think for remembering and recalling things a database would be vastly superior to a file system.

Answer 3

A robust/flexible solution in Java (C++ too, but I wouldn't know how) would be using a database. Java 1.6 comes with the Apache derby database which can be embedded in your apps. Using JPA (Java Persistence API) makes it easy to interface with any database you can find drivers for.

Answer 4

Not stupid, but a little ill-formed maybe.

What you're going to do as your program "learns" something is update the state of some data structure. If you want to retain that state, you need to persist the data structure to some external store. That means translating the data structure to some external formal that you can read back in without loss.

Java provides a straightforward way to do this via the Serializable interface; you Serialize the data by sending Serializable ojects out through an ObjectStream; the same ObjectStream will reload them later.

Answer 5

You should look into Neural Network software development. Here's a collection of nice Neural Network libraries for different languages. I am not sure if this is the easy way but once accomplished would be very handy.