September 25, 2020 Python

Dimensionality Reduction in Python with Scikit-Learn

Introduction In machine learning, the performance of a model only benefits from more features up until a certain point. The more features are fed into a model, the more the dimensionality of the data increases. As the dimensionality increases, overfitting becomes more likely. There are multiple techniques that can be used to fight overfitting, but dimensionality reduction is one of the most effective techniques. Dimensionality reduction selects the most important components of the feature space, preserving them and dropping the […]

September 25, 2020 Python

Insertion Sort in Python

Introduction If you’re majoring in Computer Science, Insertion Sort is most likely one of the first sorting algorithms you have heard of. It is intuitive and easy to implement, but it’s very slow on large arrays and is almost never used to sort them. Insertion sort is often illustrated by comparing it to sorting a hand of cards while playing rummy. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, most players want the cards in their hand sorted in ascending […]

September 25, 2020 Python

Unit Testing in Python with Unittest

Introduction In almost all fields, products are thoroughly tested before being released to the market to ensure its quality and that it works as intended. Medicine, cosmetic products, vehicles, phones, laptops are all tested to ensure that they uphold a certain level of quality that was promised to the consumer. Given the influence and reach of software in our daily lives, it is important that we test our software thoroughly before releasing it to our users to avoid issues coming […]

September 25, 2020 Python

Tensorflow 2.0: Solving Classification and Regression Problems

After much hype, Google finally released TensorFlow 2.0 which is the latest version of Google’s flagship deep learning platform. A lot of long-awaited features have been introduced in TensorFlow 2.0. This article very briefly covers how you can develop simple classification and regression models using TensorFlow 2.0. Classification with Tensorflow 2.0 If you have ever worked with Keras library, you are in for a treat. TensorFlow 2.0 now uses Keras API as its default library for training classification and regression […]

September 25, 2020 Python

List Comprehensions in Python

A list is one of the fundamental data types in Python. Every time you come across a variable name that’s followed by a square bracket [], or a list constructor, it is a list capable of containing multiple items, making it a compound data type. Similarly, it is also a breeze to declare a new list and subsequently add one or more items to it. Let us create a new populated list, for example: >>> new_list = [1, 2, 3, […]

September 25, 2020 Python

Serving Files with Python’s SimpleHTTPServer Module

Introduction Servers are computer software or hardware that processes requests and deliver data to a client over a network. Various types of servers exist, with the most common ones being web servers, database servers, application servers, and transaction servers. Widely used web servers such as Apache, Monkey, and Jigsaw are quite time-consuming to set up when testing out simple projects and a developer’s focus is shifted from producing application logic to setting up a server. Python’s SimpleHTTPServer module is a […]

September 25, 2020 Python

Creating Command Line Utilities with Python’s argparse

Introduction Most of the user-facing software comes with a visually pleasing interface or via a decorated webpage. At other times, a program can be so small that it does not warrant an entire graphical user interface or web application to expose its functionality to the end-user. In these cases, we can build programs that are accessible via a Command Line Interface, or CLI. In this post, we will explore Python’s argparse module and use it to build a simple command-line […]

September 25, 2020 Python

Executing Shell Commands with Python

Introduction Repetitive tasks are ripe for automation. It is common for developers and system administrators to automate routine tasks like health checks and file backups with shell scripts. However, as those tasks become more complex, shell scripts may become harder to maintain. Fortunately, we can use Python instead of shell scripts for automation. Python provides methods to run shell commands, giving us the same functionality of those shells scripts. Learning how to run shell commands in Python opens the door […]

September 25, 2020 Python

Encoding and Decoding Base64 Strings in Python

Introduction Have you ever received a PDF or an image file from someone via email, only to see strange characters when you open it? This can happen if your email server was only designed to handle text data. Files with binary data, bytes that represent non-text information like images, can be easily corrupted when being transferred and processed to text-only systems. Base64 encoding allows us to convert bytes containing binary or text data to ASCII characters. By encoding our data, […]

September 25, 2020 Python

Merge Sort in Python

Introduction Merge Sort is one of the most famous sorting algorithms. If you’re studying Computer Science, Merge Sort, alongside Quick Sort is likely the first efficient, general-purpose sorting algorithm you have heard of. It is also a classic example of a divide-and-conquer category of algorithms. Merge Sort The way Merge Sort works is: An initial array is divided into two roughly equal parts. If the array has an odd number of elements, one of those “halves” is by one element […]

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