Week 2

Week 2(Getting the feet wet)

Back to work on Tuesday. My conference went well and made some great research contacts. 

Day 1:

• My Desktop finally arrived so I had to set it up. Big task; since I was so used to the UNIX ecosystem that I actually forgot how Windows feels.
• Never the less spent the day setting up the environment and finishing all the training tutorials

Day 2:

•  Started studying the effect of different losses on computing the gradient. 
• Came across a new loss function that accounts for managing outliers. Would recommend it to all(Huber Loss)

Day 3:

• Realized that regression was required for both classification and regression based gradient boosting. In the case of classification methods, the gradient is computed on the probability of a class. Thus, we need regression methods to power classification methods.
• Regression Tree is not implemented in ECL. I might have to implement this and I am excited about this prospect.
• Thought of building a proof of concept using linear regression classifier.
• Set up stub methods for Gradient Boosting Classifiers

Day 4: 

• Completed the stub methods as planned.
• Committed source code to github.