I am thrilled to announce that “C++ Fundamentals” is finally ready! Francesco Zoffoli and I have been working on this for quite a while now. Hit the ground running with C++, the language that supports tech giants globally. If you’re a developer looking to learn a new powerful language, or are familiar with C++ but want to update your knowledge with the modern paradigms of C++11, C++14, and C++17,…
The basic Nearest Neighbor (NN) algorithm is simple and can be used for classification or regression. NN is a non-parametric approach and the intuition behind it is that similar examples \(x^t\) should have similar outputs \(r^t\). Given a training set, all we need to do to predict the output for a new example \(x\) is to find the “most similar” example \(x^t\) in the training set. A slight…
I finally found some time to do some machine learning. It is something I have always wanted to start practicing, as it is pretty clear that it is the future of complex problem solving. Indeed, for some tasks, we do not have an algorithm we can write and execute, so we make it up from the data. Machine learning uses the theory of statistics in building mathematical models. 1 - Ethem Alpaydin A…
In the previous post we discovered how to compress a set of integers by representing it as a bitmap and then compressing the latter using a succinct representation. This post instead is about compression of monotone non-decreasing integers lists by using Elias-Fano encoding. It may sound like a niche algorithm, something that solves such an infrequent problem, but it is not like this. Inverted…
A bitmap, also referred to as bit-vector or bit-array, is a sequence of 0s and 1s which typically encodes a more complex object. A common example of this is a set of numbers where each of the elements are indicated as set bits in a bitmap of length equal to the greatest element plus one (as we count from zero), also commonly referred as the universe . As an example, the set {3,5,21,4,23,12} can be…
This is my first post in my new personal blog. I will use this place to write about technology, programming and, maybe, to keep you updated about my personal life too. I recently started using Twitter more often, but I realized that sometime is not enough when you want to express a longer or more complex concept. So, in those cases I will write here but please keep following on Twitter if you are…