Week 4

Week 4

The plan for this week was to develop a decision tree for regression.

Day 1:

• I spent the whole day studying how decision tree is implemented in ECL. It was one complex code and since I am new to  ECL it was a lot to take.
• I realized that the core logic of the splitting criteria is a very small part and most of the code is data transformation
• Once that sunk in, I know what to do.

Day 2:

• The choice to choose the splitting criteria was the next challenge.
• The simplest decision tree to implement I think is the standard deviation based ID3 algorithm and I spent the day reading about it.
• I also implemented the stub methods for the decision tree.

Day 3:

• The day was spent implementing the splitting criteria and completed it.

Day 4: 

• The first half of the day was spent attending a talk by Jamie Buckley, the Chief Product Officer.
• He gave a nice talk on his journey in the tech industry and all the cutting edge technology at Lexis Nexis.
• I was really impressed by the work in Machine Learning especially the Socrates project.
• I spent the rest the day, completing the learning and prediction functions.

Day 5:

• There was a small bug in the predict function and I spent some time fixing it.
• I implemented a small test for verifying the implementation of Decision Tree and compared it against Linear Regression.