Archives of Python

Progress on High Performance Python book

I figured a short update was in order. Micha (@mynameisfiber, github) and I are progressing on our High Performance Python book, we have a proposed chapter outline below and hope to have a rough cut of some early chapters for January. The book should be finalised ‘earlier in 2014’ though we won’t be drawn on […]

“Introducing Python for Data Science” talk at SkillsMatter

On Wednesday Bart and I spoke at SkillsMatter to 75 Pythonistas with an Introduction to Data Science using Python. A video of the 4 talks is now online. We covered: High Performance Python (profiling, line_profiler, memory_profiler, Cython, Numba) Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning (scikit-learn for brand detection) – based on my longer talk at […]

Future Cities Hackathon (@ds_ldn) Oct 2013 on Parking Usage Inefficiencies

On Saturday six of us attended the Future Cities Hackathon organised by Carlos and DataScienceLondon (@ds_ldn). I counted about 100 people in the audience (see lots of photos, original meetup thread), from asking around there seemed to be a very diverse skill set (Python and R as expected, lots of Java/C, Excel and other tools). […]

PyConUK 2013

I’m just finishing with PyConUK, it has been a fun 3 days (and the sprints carry on tomorrow). Yesterday I presented a lightly tweaked version of my Brand Disambiguation with scikit-learn talk on natural language processing for social media processing. I had 65 people in the room (cripes!), 2/3 had used ML or NLP for […]

Writing a High Performance Python book

I’m terribly excited to announce that I’m co-authoring an O’Reilly book on High Performance Python, to be published next year. My co-author is the talented Micha Gorelick (github @mynameisfiber) of bit.ly, he’s already written a few chapters, I’ll be merging an updated version of my older eBook and adding content based on past tutorials (PyCon […]

EuroSciPy 2013 write-up

The conference is over, tomorrow I’m sticking around to Sprint on scikit-learn. As last year it has been a lot of fun to catch up with colleagues out here in Brussels. Here’s Logilab’s write-up. Yesterday I spoke on Building an Open Source Data Science company. Topics included how companies benefit from open sourcing their tools, […]

Overfitting with a Decision Tree

Below is a plot of Training versus Testing errors using a Precision metric (actually 1.0-precision, so lower is better) that shows how easy it is to over-fit a decision tree to the detriment of generalisation. It is important to check that a classifier isn’t overfitting to the training data such that it is just learning […]

Visualising True Positives and False Positives against Features with scikit-learn

Here I’m starting to look into the errors caused in the social media brand disambiguator project. Below I look at true and false positives (correct and mistaken is-a-brand classifications) and plot them against the number of features that two different classifiers can use to calculate their class membership probabilities. First I’m using the default LogisticRegression […]

Visualising the internals of Logistic Regression on a Text Matrix

Below I have some plots that visualise the term matrix (as a binary matrix and as a TF-IDF matrix) for the brand disambiguation project followed by a visualisation of the coefficients used in scikit-learn’s LogisticRegression classifier using l1 and l2 penalties. Using a CountVectorizer with binary=True we can mark the absence or presence of a […]