Last Updated on June 27, 2017 In my courses and guides, I teach the preparation of a baseline result before diving into spot checking algorithms. A student of mine recently asked: If a baseline is not calculated for a problem, will it make the results of other algorithms questionable? He went on to ask: If other algorithms do not give better accuracy than the baseline, what lesson should we take from it? Does it indicate that the data set does not […]

Last Updated on August 15, 2020 We all know the satisfaction of running an analysis and seeing the results come back the way we want them to: 80% accuracy; 85%; 90%? The temptation is strong just to turn to the Results section of the report we’re writing, and put the numbers in. But wait: as always, it’s not that straightforward. Succumbing to this particular temptation could undermine the impact of otherwise completely valid analysis. With most machine learning algorithms it’s […]

Last Updated on March 5, 2020 We live in a world drowning in data. Internet tracking, stock market movement, genome sequencing technologies and their ilk all produce enormous amounts of data. Most of this data is someone else’s responsibility, generated by someone else, stored in someone else’s database, which is maintained and made available by… you guessed it… someone else. But. Whenever we carry out a machine learning project we are working with a small subset of the all the […]

Last Updated on August 15, 2020 You often jump from problem-to-problem in applied machine learning and you need to get up to speed on a new dataset, fast. A classical and under-utilised approach that you can use to quickly build a relationship with a new data problem is Exploratory Data Analysis. In this post you will discover Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), the techniques and tactics that you can use and why you should be performing EDA on your next problem. […]

Last Updated on March 5, 2020 The most commonly reported measure of classifier performance is accuracy: the percent of correct classifications obtained. This metric has the advantage of being easy to understand and makes comparison of the performance of different classifiers trivial, but it ignores many of the factors which should be taken into account when honestly assessing the performance of a classifier. What Is Meant By Classifier Performance? Classifier performance is more than just a count of correct classifications. […]