ChatGPT is making me better at ML coding
I am on a journey to build solid fundamentals (practically at least) in AI-ML. Plan is to implement most prevalent class of algorithms from scratch. Now, in the past I’ve used most of these algorithms, almost always using some specialised libraries (say sklearn, tensorflow, pytorch). But I’ve noticed in the ML interview rounds of big tech firms they start from basics, and grill you at every step or chance they get. So I want want to get really good at doing the basics.
It goes like this, break down any problem statement into atomic steps. The EDA and viz, data preprocessing and transformations, understanding pros and cons of different modeling options from the perspective of the given problem, loss functions and eval scores, and lastly doing the predictions. I just want to be very handy and deft at doing these for very basic problems and the advanced ones.
I took a simple regression problem (from Kaggle) and started working on it. Tried Linear Regression with different features, transformed targets etc., but couldn’t reach anywhere close to the eval score most were achieving in the competition. Then understood that because of heteroskedasticity in the data, these linear models would never be able to explain the variance in data (unless of course we use feature interactions to increase complexity), therefore moved onto Tree based methods, and now implementing Decision Trees, Random Forests, Gradient Boosting Decision Trees, and so on..
Let me get to the point, through this process, I’ve been using chatgpt as my pair programmer. I ask for suggestions, explain my point of view and get feedback, discuss with it how i plan to implement methodically. Earlier when I would have tried to embark on such a journey, at any hurdle I would need to resort to some stackoverflow posts, blogs, YouTube videos, which would easily derail me from the flow. Or I shall say I never was able to continue being interested in such attempts.
Moreover, using chatgpt drastically saves me time in many ways:
Time saved from going for unnecessary Google or YouTube search, and getting pulled into distractions instead
It’s way easier to get any silliest or fundamentals questions answered, right there and then, so it gets very productive to just improve and keep making connections, building up the knowledge.
The GEM, it has shifted my thinking that it’s way faster to understand while such specific resource, instead of watching or reading blogs that just are full of space wasting nonsense.
Cheers!