Project 1 on Machine Learning, deadline October 1

Regression analysis and classification

Introduction

Part a): The data

Background literature

Introduction to numerical projects

Here follows a brief recipe and recommendation on how to write a report for each project.

• Give a short description of the nature of the problem and the eventual numerical methods you have used.
• Describe the algorithm you have used and/or developed. Here you may find it convenient to use pseudocoding. In many cases you can describe the algorithm in the program itself.
• Include the source code of your program. Comment your program properly.
• If possible, try to find analytic solutions, or known limits in order to test your program when developing the code.
• Include your results either in figure form or in a table. Remember to label your results. All tables and figures should have relevant captions and labels on the axes.
• Try to evaluate the reliabilty and numerical stability/precision of your results. If possible, include a qualitative and/or quantitative discussion of the numerical stability, eventual loss of precision etc.
• Try to give an interpretation of you results in your answers to the problems.
• Critique: if possible include your comments and reflections about the exercise, whether you felt you learnt something, ideas for improvements and other thoughts you've made when solving the exercise. We wish to keep this course at the interactive level and your comments can help us improve it.
• Try to establish a practice where you log your work at the computerlab. You may find such a logbook very handy at later stages in your work, especially when you don't properly remember what a previous test version of your program did. Here you could also record the time spent on solving the exercise, various algorithms you may have tested or other topics which you feel worthy of mentioning.

Format for electronic delivery of report and programs

The preferred format for the report is a PDF file. You can also use DOC or postscript formats or as an ipython notebook file. As programming language we prefer that you choose between C/C++, Fortran2008 or Python. The following prescription should be followed when preparing the report:

• Use Devilry to hand in your projects, log in at http://devilry.ifi.uio.no with your normal UiO username and password and choose either 'fysstk3155' or 'fysstk4155'. There you can load up the files within the deadline.
• Upload only the report file! For the source code file(s) you have developed please provide us with your link to your github domain. The report file should include all of your discussions and a list of the codes you have developed. Do not include library files which are available at the course homepage, unless you have made specific changes to them.
• In your git repository, please include a folder which contains selected results. These can be in the form of output from your code for a selected set of runs and input parameters.
• In this and all later projects, you should include tests (for example unit tests) of your code(s).
• Comments from us on your projects, approval or not, corrections to be made etc can be found under your Devilry domain and are only visible to you and the teachers of the course.

Software and needed installations

If you have Python installed (we recommend Python3) and you feel pretty familiar with installing different packages, we recommend that you install the following Python packages via pip as

1. pip install numpy scipy matplotlib ipython scikit-learn tensorflow sympy pandas pillow

See below for a discussion of tensorflow and scikit-learn.

For OSX users we recommend also, after having installed Xcode, to install brew. Brew allows for a seamless installation of additional software via for example

1. brew install python3

1. sudo apt-get install python3 (or python for python2.7)

If you don't want to install various Python packages with their dependencies separately, we recommend two widely used distrubutions which set up all relevant dependencies for Python, namely

1. Anaconda Anaconda is an open source distribution of the Python and R programming languages for large-scale data processing, predictive analytics, and scientific computing, that aims to simplify package management and deployment. Package versions are managed by the package management system conda
2. Enthought canopy is a Python distribution for scientific and analytic computing distribution and analysis environment, available for free and under a commercial license.

• Scikit-learn,
• Tensorflow,
• PyTorch and
• Keras.