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Ranking Search Results A search engine returns hundreds of documents for a query of a few words. Which documents are “better” matches to the query? One approach is to treat the query itself as a document and calculate the cosine similarity (see Part 1 of this series) between it and each of the returned documents.… Read more

Spreadsheets Are Programming Too Watching the stock market recover dramatically since the bottom was hit in 2009 when all hopes for not dying at my desk in a windowless office somewhere were dashed, I’m suddenly in a mind to work out how best to budget retirement though it’s still likely ten years or more away.… Read more

Goals My goal here is not to provide a detailed how-to for creating a machine learning system. Most people who do anything with machine learning will be using systems already built into tools such as Splunk, Elastic Search or other such software. I’m only seeking to provide some basic understanding of how machine learning systems… Read more

1 Introduction New objects are usually created by using the “new” operator and possibly passing a number of arguments to the constructor.  But for classes with many properties or with a more complex structure, the number of parameters the constructor needs becomes unwieldy or intractable.  Allocating an uninitialized object and then initializing its properties with… Read more