Tag Archives: Learnings

Learnings from eMasters Data Science for Decision Making – IIT Gandhinagar – Part 1

Below are the learnings from eMasters Data Science for Decision Making – IIT Gandhinagar – Part 1. This needs to be an article in itself. You can find more details here about eDSDM here: e-Masters | IITGNX

  • There is Mathematics for your AIML problem in feature engineering, preprocessing, evaluation metrics, models, errors, etc. and so on or you can build some relationship between Mathematics and your problem either by breaking the problem into pieces or transforming data and so on.
  • Human intuition is still invaluable like in situations of imbalanced datasets, regression and more.
  • Visualization and EDA almost always help for your problems. For higher dimension problems you can do PCA, T-SNE, shadowing on lower dimensions, etc. more approaches to bring it to lower dimensions with or without transformation like basis transformation. In this situation, you should also feed data after this transformation for testing / using the model.
  • There are problems beyond model selection and preprocessing, feature engineering like data quality, overfitting, evaluation, errors, hyper parameter tuning and generalization which we need to think about.
  • Situations like classification of medical diagnosis issues have very high value repercussions for wrong classification whereas some models with overfitting won’t generalize and cause problems like in normal situations with regression.
  • Probability concepts like equally likely for randomness, distributions, fairness, probability tree, joint probability, permutations and combinations, etc. have lot of value and are worth learning.
  • There is no learning like learning by experience, concepts and application.
  • Your assumptions maybe wrong as well so it’s good to verify.
  • Accuracy alone may not be a good measure, please add recall & precision as well in your analysis especially in imbalanced datasets.
  • Domain knowledge matters. Don’t ignore this.
  • Email me: Neil@HarwaniSytems.in
  • Website: www.HarwaniSystems.in
  • Blog: www.TechAndTrain.com/blog
  • LinkedIn: Neil Harwani | LinkedIn

Stories from my career & education – Part – I

Have been observing people posting their stories on LinkedIn and other places. This is my attempt at short summaries of learnings over the years from my career and education – Part 1. As this peeks into 1990s and 2000s, its difficult to recollect details but the overall learnings do remain.

School – Airforce school – 1990-92: Vague memories but the critical thing was holistic learning. What I do remember is a school that introduced us to discipline, computers, games, extra curriculars and more along with good education with a report card having lots of parameters in terms of evaluation rather than only academics. Learnings: Holistic learning.

School – Xavier’s – 1992-98: Place where we led a simple, disciplined life with a happy class of individuals from across the country. Schooling for me included scoring decent marks in 10th, 11th & 12th and getting into engineering along with playing non-stop whole day whenever we got a chance. More than 70-80% of the class seems to be achievers in their specific areas now. Learnings: Values, Simplicity, Good education.

College – LDCE – Civil engineering – 1998-2004: Critical learning was to manage things on your own which included freelancing to get work, learning computers, deciding how to study, being self sufficient, interacting with multi-geographical group of students from across India, making friends and understanding the value of stepping stones and foundation in life. Learnings: Unless you build a foundation of knowledge, discipline and goals – you will continue to face problems.

College – ICFAI Hyderabad / Dehradun – 2004-2006: Learned advanced concepts of technology around Java, Networking, Operating systems and more in a very tight / packed schedule of two years – probably included 25-30+ subjects at a place where I was forced to build a new network of friends. Met some wonderful friends from Northern and other parts of India. Got placed into services part of the then booming Information Technology industry from here. Learnings: Focus on goals around technology & career.

Will come out with part two at a later point of time for 2006 onwards.

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in