Machine Learning 101

#ML #Diary

Google has just released a series of videos to teach machine learning.

The first step is, however, installing and playing with Anaconda — a completely free Python distribution (including for commercial use and redistribution). It includes more than 400 of the most popular Python packages for science, math, engineering, and data analysis.

Choose the command line installer (on OSX) — it will save you a LOT of bother.

Installing Anaconda also means getting to know and love Conda — a package manager application that quickly installs, runs, and updates packages and their dependencies. It seems to be like pip, but better?

Conda has a test drive, which I am now trying out. Notes as I go along —

1. Step one failed. I needed to try reinstalling using the command line installer. Chrome blocks the download as malicious, so I got the file using curl. Now running the installation. I had to edit .bash_profile to edit the PATH variable to include the conda directory. Everything seems to be working now.
2. I ran through the test drive in about half the suggested time. The most useful thing was the conda cheat sheet I downloaded.

Key commands:

• Create an environment — conda create -n snowflakes biopython
• Switch to the environment — source activate snowflakes
• Remove an environment — conda remove -n snowflakes --all
• Install a new package to an environment — conda install -n snowflakes beautiful-soup

Now creating an environment — calling it datalab — and installing the scikit-learn package: conda create -n datalab scikit-learn

Originally published on WordPress; syndicated to Medium.