I have purchased Toby Segaran's book Programming Collective Intelligence when it first come out in 2007. Yet I still have not been able to finished it after all these years. Now I am giving myself another push. While I was revisiting the book I tried to implement its technique using Pandas. I am quite happy to be able to do it in just 9 lines of code. So I have put together a little article to show collaborative filtering using Pandas. This is also a great exercise for me using to make a very nice document using iPython notebook for the first time.
The main reason for not having completed the book is not because it is not interesting or not useful. It is very much an excellent book to introduce readers to the topic of collective intelligence. The problem is I strive to work through all the coding examples and not just to read the text. Many times I have feel the examples given, designed for average programmer without additional experience, often has low abstraction level. I tried to improve them, including building some tools on myself. This unfortunately doomed me because I never have the time to build the tools or even just to work through the exercises in sufficient detail. This time around I feel that I have gained a lot of experience and have access to many tools like Pandas. I hope this will be an enjoyable exercise.
2012.12.17 - comments
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