Welcome to the fifth video in the series “Data Science for Beginners”.

In this one, you’ll discover a place to find examples that you can borrow from as a starting point for your own work. You might get the most out of this video if you first watch the earlier videos in this series.

One of the trade secrets of data science is getting other people to do your work for you.

Find examples in the Cortana Intelligence Gallery

Microsoft has a cloud-based service called Azure Machine Learning that you’re welcome to try for free. It provides you with a workspace where you can experiment with different machine learning algorithms, and, when you’ve got your solution worked out, you can launch it as a web service.

Part of this service is something called the Cortana Intelligence Gallery. It contains a variety of resources, one of which is a collection of Azure Machine Learning experiments, or models, that people have built and contributed for others to use. These experiments are a great way to leverage the thought and hard work of others to get you started on your own solutions.

You can find the gallery at aka.ms/CortanaIntelligenceGallery. Everyone is welcome to browse through it.

If you click Experiments at the top, you’ll see a number of the most recent and popular experiments in the gallery. You can search through the rest of experiments by clicking Browse All at the top of the screen, and there you can enter search terms and choose search filters.

Find and use a clustering example

So, for instance, let’s say you want to see an example of how clustering works, so you search for “clustering” experiments.

Here’s an interesting one that someone contributed to the gallery.

Click on that experiment and you get a web page that describes the work that this contributor did, along with some of their results.

Notice the link that says Open in Studio.

I can click on that and it takes me right to Azure Machine Learning Studio. It creates a copy of the experiment and puts it in my own workspace. This includes the contributor’s dataset, all the processing that they did, all of the algorithms that they used, and how they saved out the results.

And now I have a starting point. I can swap out their data for my own and do my own tweaking of the model. This gives me a running start, and it lets me build on the work of people who really know what they’re doing.

Find experiments that demonstrate machine learning techniques

There are other experiments in the Cortana Intelligence Gallery that were contributed specifically to provide how-to examples for people new to data science. For instance, there’s an experiment in the gallery that demonstrates how to handle missing values (Methods for handling missing values). It walks you through 15 different ways of substituting empty values, and talks about the benefits of each method and when to use it.

Cortana Intelligence Gallery is a place to find working experiments that you can use as a starting point for your own solutions.

This post taken from http://microsoft.com

Kalyan Banga

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