[mlpack] GSoC 2014 : Introduction and Interests

[Anand Soni]

Thanks a lot Ryan!

I too, would want to have a single and nice application submitted
rather than many. It was just out of interest that I was reading up on
dual trees and yes, most of the literature that I found was from
gatech. I also came across your paper on dual trees
(http://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.4327.pdf ). Can you give me some more
pointers where I can get a better understanding of dual trees?

But, of course, I am more willing to work on automatic benchmarking,
on which I had a little talk with Marcus and I am brewing ideas.

Thanks again!

Regards.
Anand

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 8:16 PM, Ryan Curtin <gth671b at mail.gatech.edu> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 05, 2014 at 10:29:40AM +0530, Anand Soni wrote:
>> Marcus,
>> Thanks for the guidance! I will look up on these metrics.
>>
>> As far as visual performance analysis is concerned, I came across
>> d3.js and hexbins.js. Once we have the required data we can generate
>> good visualizations using these tools. I plan on using either one or
>> both of them.
>>
>> Also, I was reading up on dual trees. Why exactly does mlpack need
>> dual tree implementations? I am interested to work on k-d trees.
>
> I'm confused about your question.  mlpack implements dual-tree
> algorithms both because they are fast and also because they are the line
> of research conducted by the lab that originally designed the library.
> Often, dual-tree algorithms perform other algorithms for the same task;
> for exact nearest neighbor search, there is really not a better strategy
> than using a dual-tree algorithm.
>
> The kd-tree is already implemented in mlpack and is the most stable tree
> type, so there is not too much work left to be done for it.  If you are
> interested in the implementation of tree types, take a look on the Ideas
> page and there is a list of other possible tree types there.
>
>> Is it alright to submit proposals for two projects?
>
> Yes, this is fine.  But know that every mlpack Summer of Code project is
> very in-depth, and the quality of the application is far more important
> than the quantity of the application.  That is to say, your chances are
> better if you submit one good application than two mediocre
> applications.
>
> I hope that helps.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ryan
>
> --
> Ryan Curtin    | "I was misinformed."
> ryan at ratml.org |   - Rick Blaine



-- 
Anand Soni | Junior Undergraduate | Department of Computer Science &
Engineering | IIT Bombay | India