Description
Problem 1
Read Shannon’s 1948 paper ’A Mathematical Theory of Communication’. Focus on pages 1-19 (up
to Part II), the remaining part is more relevant for communication.
http://math.harvard.edu/ ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf
Summarize what you learned briefly (e.g. half a page).
Problem 2: Scraping, Entropy and ICML papers.
ICML is a top research conference in Machine learning. Scrape all the pdfs of all ICML 2017 papers
from http://proceedings.mlr.press/v70/.
1. What are the top 10 common words in the ICML papers?
2. Let Z be a randomly selected word in a randomly selected ICML paper. Estimate the entropy
of Z.
3. Synthesize a random paragraph using the marginal distribution over words.
4. (Extra credit) Synthesize a random paragraph using an n-gram model on words. Synthesize
a random paragraph using any model you want. Top five synthesized text paragraphs win
bonus (+50 points for homeworks and labs).
Problem 3: Starting in Kaggle.
1. Lets start with our first Kaggle submission in a playground regression competition. Make
an account to Kaggle and find https://www.kaggle.com/c/house-prices-advanced-regressiontechniques/
2. Follow the data preprocessing steps from https://www.kaggle.com/apapiu/house-prices-advancedregression-techniques/regularized-linear-models. Then run a ridge regression using α = 0.1.
Make a submission of this prediction, what is the RMSE you get?
(Hint: remember to exponentiate np.expm1(ypred) your predictions).
3. Compare a ridge regression and a lasso regression model. Optimize the alphas using cross
validation. What is the best score you can get from a single ridge regression model and from
a single lasso model?
4. Plot the l0 norm (number of nonzeros) of the coefficients that lasso produces as you vary the
strength of regularization parameter alpha.
1
5. Add the outputs of your models as features and train a ridge regression on all the features
plus the model outputs (This is called Ensembling and Stacking). Be careful not to overfit.
What score can you get? (We will be discussing ensembling more, later in the class, but you
can start playing with it now).
6. Install XGBoost (Gradient Boosting) and train a gradient boosting regression. What score
can you get just from a single XGB? (you will need to optimize over its parameters). We will
discuss boosting and gradient boosting in more detail later. XGB is a great friend to all good
Kagglers!
7. Do your best to get the more accurate model. Try feature engineering and stacking many
models. You are allowed to use any public tool in python. No non-python tools allowed.
8. Read the Kaggle forums, tutorials and Kernels in this competition. This is an excellent way
to learn. Include in your report if you find something in the forums you like, or if you made
your own post or code post, especially if other Kagglers liked or used it afterwards.
9. Be sure to read and learn the rules of Kaggle! No sharing of code or data outside the Kaggle
forums. Every student should have their own individual Kaggle account and teams can be
formed in the Kaggle submissions with your Lab partner. This is more important for live
competitions of course.
10. As in the real in-class Kaggle competition (which will be next), you will be graded based on
your public score (include that in your report) and also on the creativity of your solution.
In your report (that you will submit as a pdf file), explain what worked and what did
not work. Many creative things will not work, but you will get partial credit for developing
them. We will invite teams with interesting solutions to present them in class.
2
