I spoke with a colleague about an opportunity to do some bioinformatics with her, and so I’m starting down the path of seeing how much I can learn and do in that area with what I know. The program used for this is QIIME2. At this point, I only vaguely know that it’s software that’s used for sequencing DNA and then performing various types of statistical analyses on it. What does that mean exactly? I have no idea.

The first week of the MIS 766 is complete. I’ve definitely enjoyed the course. So far, it has remained generally simpler than I thought it might be, but I’m getting exposure to ideas that are useful to have.

Natural language processing is not particularly interesting to me, and so I didn’t hit this chapter that hard. I think the ideas are kind of fun in the abstract, but I just have no interest in the methods of this section.

Clustering in the process of taking unlabeled data points and applying them with labels so that you create collections of points that are all “close” to each other with the same label. This is a way of creating categories for data points when there are no initial categories to begin with.

I haven’t posted anything, but I’ve been continuing to read Data Science from Scratch. I’ll try to do quick summaries of those chapters later this week.

It’s now June, and I’ve been at this for just over a month. I’m about 75% through the Data Science from Scratch book, and my database class at UNLV starts next Monday. The reading has been going well, even though it has been a bit slow because I’ve still got some curriculum stuff that I need to work on for the department. I’m looking forward to being done with that because it is a distraction and it does keep me from focusing on what I want to focus on.

The deep learning chapter felt very dense. I don’t think it was the code as much as it is the concept. Unlike with neural networks, I really have no previous exposure to deep learning, and so this was a slow read for me. And I think I would need to go work on some examples (preferably using some standard tools) to really get the pieces to fit together in my head correctly.