Feature engineering tips for improving predictions..

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Choose your best platform for machine learning

My new blog entry on choosing best platform for machine learning based solution... https://asimovweb.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/choose-your-best-platform-for-machine-learning-solution/

Moving to wordpress blog

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Fast forward transformation process in data science with Apache Spark

Data Curation :

Curation is a critical process in data science that helps to prepare data for feature extraction to run with machine learning algorithms. Curation generally involves extracting, organising, integrating data from different sources. Curation may be a difficult and time consuming process depending on the complexity and volume of the data involved.

Most of the time data won't be readily available for feature extraction process, data may be hidden is unobstructed and complex data sources and has to undergo multiple transformational process before feature extraction .

Also when the volume of data is huge this will be a huge time consuming process and can be a bottle neck for the whole machine learning pipeline.

General Tools used in Data Science :

R Language - Widely adopted in data science with lot of supporting libraries

Mat lab - Commercial tool with lot of builtin libraries for data science

Apache Spark - New, powerful and gaining traction, Spark on Hadoop provides distributed and Resilient architecture help to fasten the curation process by multiple times.

Recent Study

One of my project involved curing and extracting the features from huge volume of data in natural language conversation text. We started with using R programming language for the transformation process, R language is simple with lot of functionalities in statistics and data science space but has limitations in terms of computation and memory and in turn efficiency and speed. We tried to migrate the transformation process to Apache Spark and observed tremendous improvement in the performance of transformation, We were able to bring down the time for transformation from more day to almost an hour of time for huge volume of data.

Here are some of the benefits that I would like to highlight the benefits of Apache Spark over R.

Effective Utilization of resources:

By default R runs in a single core and is limited by the capabilities of the single core and memory usage. Even though you have multi core system R is limited with using only one core, for memory it has the process limitations of a 32 bit R execution with virtual memory user space of 3 GB and for 64 bit R execution limited to amount of RAM. R has some parallel lib packages that can help to span the processing to multi cores.

Spark can run in distributed form with the processing running on executors with each executor running on its own process utilizing the cpu and memory.Spark brings the concept of RDD (Resilient Distributed Dataset) to achieve distributed , resilient and scalable processing solution.

Optimized transformation:

Spark has the concept of Transformation and Actions where the transformation perform lazy evaluation of job execution until an Action task is being called and intern brings optimization when multiple transformations are involved before an Action task which leads to transferring the results back to the driver program

Integration to Hadoop Eco System

Spark integrates well in the Hadoop ecosystem with yarn architecture and can easily bind to HDFS , multiple NOSQL database like HBase, Cassandra etc.

Support for multiple languages:

Spark API's has support on multiple programming languages like Scala, Java and Python

Google Auto Awesome Video - Is it a machine learning solution ???

Wish you all a very happy and a wonderful new year 2016 !!!

Happy to start the year with a blog covering some aspects on machine learning and this post is actually an inspiration from the new year eve celebration.

In the new year eve celebration with friends and I captured some photo moments using google photos app. The next day morning when I woke up I got a notification in mobile , would you like to review and save the video made out of photos in the new year eve event with some nice background music added, in google terms they call as Auto Awesome videos in google photos app.

I am happy to see the video that has been made automatically and ready to share , there is also a manual mode where we can customize photos for the video. But my interest is on the automatic creation and started thinking how this design could have been ?

At first cut I was able to sense this could potentially be a machine learning implementation and with my limited data science knowledge I thought to do provide some guess work on how this could have been designed while running at a large scale for millions of tenants at the server end

Let us understand the requirement in detail , given a collection of images we have to perform the following

Categorize the images into groups and pick the group corresponding to a specific event say the new year celebration in this case.

To improve accuracy , check and eliminate any irrelevant images that went into the group by error

Judge the mood of the event and add appropriate background music

Now let us analyse the type of machine learning solutions that could have potentially been used for this design

First part of the problem is towards categorizing the images into groups based on some parameters , Clustering algorithm could be a best fit to perform this. Given a specific dataset clustering helps to categorize the dataset into different partitions based on features of data, In our scenario grouping could be based on time of photo taken but I have seen cases where grouping is done based on image background and persons involved.

Next is to eliminate outliers in the grouping ,some photos might have accidentally went in to the group. Algorithms like anomaly detection can be executed to eliminate those outlier images in the collection.

Final step is to understand the mood of the images and add relevant background music to the video, sentiment analysis algorithm on pictures could potentially help to understand the mood of the images.

Disclaimer : This is purely my own guess work of the design and google might have done in a different way :)