machine-learning

How to robustly, but minimally, distribute items across a peer-to-peer system

If one has a peer-to-peer system that can be queried, one would like to reduce the total number of queries across the network (by distributing "popular" items widely and "similar" items together) avoid excess storage at each node assure good availability to even moderately rare items in the face of client downtime, hardware failure, ...

How Do You Categorize Based On Text Content?

How does one automatically find categories for text based on content? ...

Suggestion needed to learn Machine Learning and Information Retrieval

Hi! I want lo learn about Information Retrieval and Machine Learning. Which books do you recommend and in what order do you think is better to read them? The idea is to reach a good understanding of recommendation systems. Thanks! Jonathan ...

Anyone Recommend a Good Tutorial on Conditional Random Fields

I have been trying to find a good tutorial on Conditional Random Fields and have yet to find one that didn't start sending my brain into meltdown. I have a good grasp of HMM's, and I get the difference between discriminative and generative models ... but as of yet I have not been able to find a resource that can give a good comparison of...

Will I Need a Computer Science Education for Soft Computing/Machine Learning?

I am a self taught software engineer who is currently studying the MIT OpenCourseWare courses (currently Discrete Math and Multivariable Calculus). I have a passion to learn and the ability to teach myself. What I am wondering is if I want to work in soft computing in 5-10 years will I need a degree for that? I know I'll need to study m...

Machine Learning, AI, and Soft Computing

What is the difference between these three heavily related fields? Is there one specific whole they are all a part of (aside from CS)? ...

What are known uses of AI in web development?

What are known uses of AI/machine-learning in web development? And what would be some fields that, currently don't use AI, but could possibly benefit from AI? Note: I've worked on AI for academics, simulations and games before, and I'm currently doing some informal/personal research right now, so I'm looking for some new fields to draw...

What are some practical applications for a single layer perceptron?

I was having a look at this awesome tutorial on single layer perceptron. I tried the implementation out and it works like charm, but I was wondering if it's there any practical use for it as is (at such a low complexity degree). Any example? ...

Find class probabilities in matlab PNN and make ROC plot

I have a Probablistic Neural Network classification experiment set up in matlab. I can get the classes for unseen data using the sim command. Is there any way i can get the probabilities for the classes that the classifier calculates. Also is there any direct way to plot the Reciever Operating Characterstic curve and calculate the Area U...

Graduate Level Degree for Simulation/Statistics/Prediction?

I am wondering if anyone has any insight into this. I am thinking of going to grad school to get some computer science related degree. I have always been intrigued by people who are working on problems using statistical packages or simulation to solve problems. What would I study to get a good breadth of knowledge of these things? Do the...

How does the Google "Did you mean?" Algorithm work?

I've been developing an internal website for a portfolio management tool. There is a lot of text data, company names etc. I've been really impressed with some search engines ability to very quickly respond to queries with "Did you mean: xxxx". I need to be able to intelligently take a user query and respond with not only raw search re...

Mathematics for AI/Machine learning ?

I intend to build a simple recommendation systems for fun. I read a little on the net and figured being good at math would enable on to build a good recommendation system. My math skills are not good. I am willing to put considerable efforts and time in learning maths. Can you please tell me what mathematics topics should I cover? Al...

Parallel programming course or classification and prediction course?

Well I can't decide if I should take the "Parallel Programming and Architectures" course, or the "Algorithms for Classification and Prediction" course ... so I figured I'd ask my very first StackOverFlow question ;) Really, I'm curious about parallel programming vs machine learning ... they're both very interesting areas. How much par...

Bayesian networks tutorial

Hello all, for a beginner, which is the best book to start with for studying Bayesian Networks? Thanks, Lucian ...

Techniques for building recommendation engines?

The book Programming Collective Intelligence presents a technique for computing similar links/users based on the distance between the links/users in a huge metric space (user x bookmarked this link / link x was bookmarked by this user). What other techniques have been developed for recommendation engines? ...

Measuring the performance of classification algorithm

I've got a classification problem in my hand, which I'd like to address with a machine learning algorithm ( Bayes, or Markovian probably, the question is independent on the classifier to be used). Given a number of training instances, I'm looking for a way to measure the performance of an implemented classificator, with taking data overf...

Canonicalize NFL team names.

This is actually a machine learning classification problem but I imagine there's a perfectly good quick-and-dirty way to do it. I want to map a string describing an NFL team, like "San Francisco" or "49ers" or "San Francisco 49ers" or "SF forty-niners", to a canonical name for the team. (There are 32 NFL teams so it really just means f...

cool project to use a genetic algorithm for?

I'm looking for a practical application to use a genetic algorithm for. Some things that have thought of are: Website interface optimization Vehicle optimization with a physics simulator Genetic programming Automatic test case generation But none have really popped out at me. So if you had some free time (a few months) to spend on a ...

Way to infer the size of the userbase of a site from sampling taken usernames

I just had a clever idea (I think). Suppose you wanted to estimate the size of a userbase of a site which does not publicize this information. People are more likely to have acquired different usernames with different probabilities. For instance, if the username 'nick' doesn't exist on the system, it's likely to have an extremely small...

Neural Network Structure

I am currently building a Neural Network library. I have constructed it as an object graph for simplicity. I am wondering if anyone can quantify the performance benefits of going to an array based approach. What I have now works very good for building networks of close to arbitrary complexity. Regular (backpropped) networks as well as r...