Principles for Applying Machine Learning Techniques

 at Factual Blog has this cool list of 5 principles for Applying Machine Learning Techniques.  His datacentric techniques are:

  • Don’t Ignore the Corners – The “Corners” are unusual cases in the Data
  • Be Attentive to the Boundaries – If you use a linear discriminant or decision tree, pay special attention to boundary cases.
  • Spend Time on Special Cases – i.e. special cases in the data.
  • Listen to the Data
  • Love Your Data
 also at Factual Blog adds this list:
  • Ask for help first.
  • The documentation is your best friend.
  • Know the ecosystem.  (Python, Java/Hadoop/Weka, R, Malab, …)
  • Machine Learning applications are mostly the boring stuff.  “The majority of the effort is in pre-processing”
  • Save the ML for the problems you can’t think to solve in any other way.
  • Coding in R makes you feel like a ninja.  “The R core library is full of awesome one-liners ….”