python - Vik's Blog

Exploring US Healthcare data

A few days ago, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released some unprecedented data on the US healthcare system. The data consists of 9 million rows showing how much each doctor in the US charged Medicare, for what, and how much Medicare paid out. It doesn’t quite

python

Simple speech recognition in Python

Sometime today, I got the idea to try to do automatic speech recognition. Speech recognition, even though it is widely used (and is on our phones), still seems kind of sci-fi-ish to me. The thought of running it on your own computer is still pretty exciting. I looked for open

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An easy way to get started with automated essay scoring

Wow, it’s been way too long since I have updated this blog! I am going to start making more frequent updates, and I have some cool things in the pipeline, so bear with me. Last year, I wrote this post on automated essay scoring. This was essentially distilling my

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On the automated scoring of essays and the lessons learned along the way

We’ve all written essays, primarily while we were in school. The sometimes enjoyable process of researching the topic and composing the paper can take hours and hours of careful work. Given this, people react badly to the notion that their essays may be scored not by a human teacher,

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How divided is the Senate?

I very seldom pay attention to politics directly, because politics have always seemed a bit circular and cyclical to me. Most of the political news that I take in ends up worming its way into the news sources that I do consume, like the excellent longform.org. Even given my

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Programming instrumental music from scratch

I recently posted about automatically making music. The algorithm that I made pulled out interesting sequences of music from existing songs and remixed them. While this worked reasonably well, it also didn’t have full control over the basics of the music; it wasn’t actually specifying which instruments to

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Evolve your own beats -- automatically generating music via algorithms

Update: you can find the next post in this series here. I recently went to an excellent music meetup where people spoke about the intersection of music and technology. One speaker in particular talked about how music is now being generated by computer. Music has always fascinated me. It can

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Do the Simpsons characters like each other?

One day, while I was walking around Cambridge, I had a random thought – how do the characters on the Simpsons feel about each other? It doesn’t take long to figure out how Homer feels about Flanders (hint: he doesn’t always like him), or how Burns feels about everyone,

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Using the power of sound to figure out which Simpsons character is speaking

Update: you can find the next post in this series here. In a previous post, I looked at transcripts of Simpsons episodes and tried to figure out which character was speaking which line. This worked decently, but it wasn’t great. It gave us memorable scenes like this one: Homer

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Figuring out which Simpsons character is speaking

Update: you can find the next post in this series here. You probably have a favorite Simpsons character. Maybe you hope to someday block out the sun, Mr. Burns style, maybe you enjoy Homer’s skill in averting meltdowns, or maybe you identify with Lisa’s struggles for acceptance. Through

math

Find the determinant of a matrix

The determinant of a matrix is a number associated with a square (nxn) matrix. The determinant can tell us if columns are linearly correlated, if a system has any nonzero solutions, and if a matrix is invertible. See the wikipedia entry for more details on this. Computing a determinant is

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Linear Regression from the Ground Up

Linear regression is a very basic technique that we use a lot in machine learning. In a lot of cases (and I have been guilty of this), we just use it without much thought as to how the internals actually work. In a 2-D coordinate system, we can plot observations

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Inverting your very own matrix

IntroductionI had my natural predilection towards math crushed out of me at some point in school, and after that point, Math (yes, we are referring to the higher power of math) and I had a wary understanding. I dabbled quietly, and Math turned a blind eye to me ignoring some

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Natural Language Processing Tutorial

IntroductionThis will serve as an introduction to natural language processing. I adapted it from slides for a recent talk at Boston Python. We will go from tokenization to feature extraction to creating a model using a machine learning algorithm. The goal is to provide a reasonable baseline on top of

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My Talk at Boston Python

I just gave a talk at Boston Python about natural language processing in general, and edX ease and discern in specific. You can find the presentation source here, and the web version of it here. There is a video of it here. Nelle Varoquaux and Michael Selik also had interesting

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Creating a Wordpress Single or Multisite Install Using Cloudformation and Ansible

IntroI recently had to create some sites quickly. After evaluating a few options, setting up a wordpress multisite seemed like a good option. In order to make this change, I setup a wordpress multisite installation with domain mapping. A multisite installation is when one wordpress install lets you run multiple