Bucharest FP

A functional programming group for those living and working in Bucharest

We gather monthly, watch someone talk about something they're passionate about and then continue the discussion in a pub

#012: An Introduction to Machine Learning using R

This meetup took place at the Eloquentix office, Wednesday, 24 June 2015 at 19:00. Find out when our next meetup is.

An Introduction to Machine Learning using R

Vlad-Ovidiu Lupu

Biography

Ovidiu is a software developer at Eloquentix, where he currently works with Scala on an application that involves data analysis and reporting. Besides functional programming, he has a long term interest in the things that fall under the umbrella term "Data Science" (machine learning, statistics, math, distributed computing).

Abstract

This presentation will first provide an overview on some basic machine learning concepts like the bias-variance tradeoff, the curse of dimensionality, overfitting and cross-validation. We will then take a deeper dive into the bias-variance tradeoff and take a look at some machine learning algorithms from both ends of the spectrum, like linear regression and ensemble methods.

The presentation will be interactive, meaning that many of the concepts above will be exemplified with code. This is a good opportunity to introduce R, a language that is getting more and more popular with people who are working with data. Because R is not a general purpose programming language, but designed to do data analysis and visualizations, we will not focus on its syntax, but on the concepts themselves, which are language agnostic. R will serve as a tool to illustrate the ideas from the presentation and we will see that many aspects of it are heavily influenced by functional programming.