I just deleted my intermediate data and models for Kaggle’s Happywhale competition. I did terrible, never getting much above pure random guessing. Which was frustrating, because it’s a problem in Machine Learning that I’m very interested in (and want to do more work in).

Happywhale, Sad Human …

Don’t join a team too quickly. Once you’re on a Kaggle team:

• You cannot choose to leave
• The team leader cannot choose to remove you

Unless you have a very good sense of what exactly your teammates are bringing to the competition, including their:

• Knowledge level
• Time commitment …

At the risk of saying, “Yeah, it’s in the docs,” this is what I did. I think the crucial thing is installed things in the proper order, so I would advise going step-by-step:

1. Have conda installed (brew install conda if not, I suppose)
2. Create a conda environment with conda …

Get the source code and data on Github

This demonstrates how you create a multistep AzureML pipeline using a series of PythonScriptStep objects.

In this case, the calculation is extremely trivial: predicting Iris species using scikit-learn's Gaussian Naive Bayes. This pipeline could be solved (very quickly) using this code:

import …

I received my Orange 30 in a well-packed box via DHL. My box did not contain a manual, which I think might be an indication that it was among the first few hundred printers shipped. (It did, however, have a USB with what would apparently have been the printed manual …

One of my big weekend projects (for longer than I care to think) has been trying to create a pipeline for identifying individual whalesharks from photos. The project had kind of grown moribund as I repeatedly failed to get any decent level of recognition despite using what I thought was …

OMG I can't believe I missed this competition. It's exactly in line with my whaleshark identification project.

https://www.kaggle.com/c/humpback-whale-identification

Here's a baby humpback whale that swam up to the boat a few weeks ago. In the second photo you can see it popped it's head up …

I'm a big fan of using a pair of identical networks to create output vectors that are then fed into a network that is trained to judge whether it's two input vectors are the same or different.

This is a powerful technique for "low k-shot" comparisons. Most ML techniques that …

Ricky Jay was one of my heroes. I first became aware of him in the pages of the remarkable “Cards as Weapons,” an oversized paperback that I bought at age 13 because it had a few pictures of topless women in it (you really can’t appreciate how much the …

Once upon a time, when I, a C programmer, first learned Smalltalk, I remember lamenting to J.D. Hildebrand "I just don't get it: where's the main()?" Eventually I figured it out, but the lesson remained: Sometimes when learning a new paradigm, what you need isn't a huge tutorial, it's …