Blog Post #1: Home Brunches, Time Crunches, Free Lunches

Hello everyone, welcome back to my blog! This week marked the start of my quest for machine learning greatness, although I concede that I embark with a bit less foresight than usual.

For the majority of my time, I’ve been confiding in the first few chapters of the textbook “Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow” to brush up on my skills. Not only is it relatively recent (meaning it doesn’t contain much outdated code), but it also contains many helpful practice exercises.

In addition to learning about coding this week, I also learned about scheduling. Since I’m working from home I’ve had to shift my schedule, so I settled on working in the morning. This way I could use devote my energy from brunch towards looking at code for three hours until lunchtime came.

Speaking of lunchtime. While I was reading about regularization techniques I saw one referred to as a “beautiful free lunch”. But if there’s no such thing as free lunch, how can that be possible? Well, it isn’t: as I’ve learned, each technique has its tradeoffs. The challenge in using these techniques is experimenting and finding the most ideal solutions that fit within your problem space. I’ve gotten a clearer picture of where I want to take my project through reading and practicing, but I aim to take the next few weeks to research tools and read the book so that I have a solid plan of action before I delve completely into the project.

Until next week,
Elysse Ahmad Yusri