

Machine Learning for Hackers Table of Contents - timf
http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p=2864

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mwexler
It's Drew Conway. The guy is good, and he makes complex things very
accessible. Sometimes, you need to understand the matrices behind the process,
and that's great, lots and lots of books out there about the math. But
sometimes you need to group up some data and you need a quick way to get it
done mostly well. There aren't as many books out there to do this as there
should be, and I look forward to this one.

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plessthanpt05
I like (& use) R, but to say it is "for hackers" seems strange to me -- not
really a "hacker" language. Seems like a bit of a marketing strategy(/gimmick)
to toss that word into the title. Looks like a promising book, though i'd much
prefer it be in a scripting language like Python.

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tikhonj
I haven't used R, but I've heard good things about it. Why isn't it for
"hackers"?

If anything, it seems like a language _more_ suited for hackers than Python
for tasks involving math--it looks like it has a more integrated environment
for fast iteration , particularly for generating nice plots of the data you're
working with. It also seems like a language designed and optimized exactly for
this sort of activity.

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programnature
The problem with domain-specific systems like R is that, as software systems,
you can't "hack" them far outside of their contraints.

Integration into other systems (like the web, or robust big-data pipelines)
can't be taken for granted. Doing "standard" stuff becomes nonstandard, thus
hacking can hit a wall.

~~~
simonw
R is open source, and there are plenty of "bridges" to talk to it from other
languages (e.g. <http://rpy.sourceforge.net/> )

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rd108
This looks like it's using R to teach, primarily. I'm partial to "Collective
Intelligence" (Toby Segaran's book)-- it's written with all python examples
and appears to have much of the same content and approach (practical
application > theoretical underpinnings).

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elemeno
If you're using Python, what are you using for your stats libraries?

R is, generally, the go to language for stats work I've found. It's certainly
used a lot in the financial world for statistical modelling, and all the
libraries in it are well tested which is a big plus in my book.

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carbocation
I'm also partial to R, but Python does have stats support via NumPy and
(especially) SciPy: <http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/stats.html>

When I was at the Broad, at least, there was heavy use of both R and Python
among the statistically savvy.

~~~
elemeno
Interesting - I'm not well versed on the Python stats ecosystem. It's a side
effect of working in finance where every place I've worked already has large
well tested libraries in C/C++/C#.

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showerst
Site is bouncing up & down for me, here's the scrib'd document he links to:

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/80949907/TOC-ML4Hackers>

Exciting!

