Last week was fun in a brain-melting kind of way…

Data Science and Neural Networks

I found some great reading on using PyTorch to build neural network classifiers and also a bunch of great writing on using Word2Vec – the problem I was trying to solve was how best to design the inputs and outputs of a NN classifier. There are so many potential data-points that could be used to influence classification, where to start?

I ended up choosing a simple, yet not-quite-so-naive approach of usingTF-IDFto build up a vector that can represent word-embedding after normalising the text-vocabulary withSpaCy. Then we pass in product information to get a predicted product classification (category-confidence vector) …it took a lot of ruminating and reading to get to this conclusion. This week I aim to write the data transformer to build the training set from the data available.

I spent a lot of time last week tuning my fuzzy-match engine as well. As I mentioned last week, an article is in progress. This week I have made the code multi-processor so at this point it is ready for a write up…

Reading

I finished reading theWolfenstein 3D Black Book. This book is basically a code-review of one of the most influential games in history. It was riveting. I could not put it down and basically finished it in a week. Loved every second. There is something really compelling about discovering how a true genius of our time (John Carmack) thinks and solved his programming problems. This is the same reason I used to lovedisassembling demosand games as a kid to understand how visual effects were made.

Goals

Just sharing one of my goals this year is “Fitness every day with a focus on diet”…I will share more goals as it makes sense to. Friday was a 14 hour day at work and the first day I missed doing exercise. I missed not doing exercise after three weeks of sticking to this goal. Got back in the saddle on Saturday and Sunday…

Last week was interesting – I had a bunch of things going on at once and all of them were kind of interesting. In fact, it would not be hard to write a full essay on each of these.

I decided I would share weekly insights with you as a way to reflect on the week that was. I felt like there is so much we do every week that could be discussed, shared, considered further. I wanted a place for that to happen and so this is it…