Now that we know what is feature selection and how to do it, let's move our focus to validating the efficiency of our model. This is known as validation or cross validation, depending on what kind of validation method you're using. But before that, let's try to understand why we need to validate our models. Validation, or Evaluation of Residuals Once you are done with fitting your model to you training data, and you've also tested it with your test data, you can't just assume that its going to work well on data that it has not seen before. In other words, you can't be sure that the model will have the desired accuracy and variance in your production environment. You need some kind of assurance of the accuracy of the predictions that your model is putting out. For this, we need to val...
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You've probably heard of Google Analytics before. We all use the tool to track various things on our websites. The tool provides information such as the location of users, page views, the kind of devices and browsers used by those users, the age group, and a lot more. But what if you want to track certain events which are specific to your website? Say you want to track how many people filled a form, or how many people clicked a link on your website? Google Analytics provides an unbelievably simple way to track these custom events. It's actually just one line of code to track such events. Let's see how you'd do just this. When you create a Google Analytics account, the tool gives you a small JavaScript code snippet to paste on your website. It's suggested that you put this code in...
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I’m working on my second project in Node.js. I kind of love it. I haven’t yet decided to find out how better it performs compared to apps written in other languages, such as PHP, or Java. But writing Node.js apps is fun, mostly because you can get npm packages for almost everything you need during development. This helps you concentrate on the business logic and not worry about writing basic boilerplate code. What’s the advantage? Well, you can write a POC/MVP app really quickly. Anyway, one thing I noticed while working on the previous Node.js app was that debugging is a bit difficult if you, like me, have an obsession with having proper log messages everywhere. So one of the first things I did when I was setting up this project was write a couple of middleware methods to log all the r...
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If you are anything like me, or tens of thousands of others working in the web development domain, you know what the title means. We are going to talk about the widely debated “v” in API endpoints. Do I like it? Well, obviously not. I’ll tell you why. 1. It’s ugly! It makes reading documentations very difficult, because you’ll need to version your document as well. And you’ll have to make sure you are using the latest document, or the document that’s relevant to the version of API you are consuming. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if you had one version of API and one version of documentation? I know what people over at the other camp are shouting — your APIs will change and you need to have versions. I agree, and I’ll tell you how I prefer to handle those changes later. 2. If y...
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Curly brackets. Well, what can I say about them? They sure do have curves! And such curves, I’m addicted! I’ve been abusing them for as long as I remember. I abuse them even today. The day I saw a piece of code for the first time, over a decade ago, I knew I’d be using those curly brackets for the rest of my life. I’m talking about curly brackets in function definitions, loops, conditional statements. I wrote my first ever program in C. As you might have guessed, it was a simple Hello, World! program. I’m not going to talk about the awesome, exciting, orgasmic, feeling that your first ever program gives you. We’ve all been through that. I’m going to tell you why I love those curly brackets so much even though they are not really mandatory in some cases today. For example, if your lo...
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In the tech industry, it’s not uncommon for developers to work on project maintenance. You could be asked to fix a few bugs in a system which is already in production and has a user base. Or to add new features, or to refactor. Sometimes, you’d even be asked to rewrite the whole project in a different language/framework. For all these, it’s very important to setup the existing code on your development machine, and understand it properly. And for this, you need proper documentation. Most projects today have their own git repository. It’s very unlikely that a project is distributed within a team by copying it on to a storage device. Even your incomplete, two-year old pet projects are usually on GitHub. This means the projects have some sort of readme file. Well, they are not there for no re
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