Stats in the Wild

If you haven’t yet discovered the competitive machine learning site kaggle.com, please do so now. I’ll wait.

Great – so, you checked it out, fell in love and have made it back. I recently downloaded the data for the getting started competition. It consists of 42000 labelled images (28×28) of hand written digits 0-9. The competition is a straight forward supervised learning problem of OCR (Optical Character Recognition). There are two sample R scripts on the site to get you started. They implement the k-nearest neighbours and Random Forest algorithms.

I wanted to get  started by visualizing all of the training data by rendering some sort of an average of each character. Visualizing the data is a great first step to developing a model. Here’s how I did it:

Which gives you:
Notice the wobbly looking ‘1’. You can see that there is some variance in the angle of…