Week 5
Things have been going okay so far. I am currently continuing the machine learning course I was working on previously. I have had some problems with one of the programming activities in this course. The activity involved implementing the gradient descent algorithm. At first, the program I wrote just gave errors and did not work at all. I had to talk to a mentor on the forum, who explained the algorithm more clearly to me. However, even after that, the program ran, but I was unable to make it give the correct result.
I am continuing work on the original project as well. I will soon contact district officials for the final data set necessary for the machine Iearning algorithm, as well as use Weka to test even more algorithms on the data sets I already possess. I am also planning to start reading another machine learning book that I have obtained, called Foundations of Machine Learning.
I also had some difficulty with that program. Keep tinkering with it and you will find what you were doing incorrectly. It’s the best way to learn!
Most of the battle is debugging! Keep chugging along, and I’m sure you’ll get the desired results.
Usually, what I do, is open a new program, and rewrite the code. Another strategy is known as the Rubber Duck strategy: basically, you take a rubber duck and you explain your code to it. 9 times out of 10, you’ll find your bug while explaining the code. Works like a charm 🙂
Good luck.