You now know a bunch about machine learning. In this video, I'd like to teach you a programming language, Octave, in which you'll be able to very quickly implement the learning algorithms we've seen already and the learning algorithms we'll see later in this course. In the past, I've tried to teach machine learning using a live variety of different programming languages including C+++, Java Python NumPy, R and also Octave. And what I've found is that students were able to learn the most productively learn the most quickly and prototype the algorithms most quickly, using a relatively high level language like Octave. In fact . what I often see in Silicon Valley is that if, even if you need to build, if you want to build a large scale deployment of a learning algorithm, what people will often do is prototype in the language like Octave, which is a great prototyping language. So you can sort of get your learning algorithms working quickly. And then, only if you need a very large scale deployment of it, only then spend your time reimplementing the algorithms in C+++ or Java, or some other language like that. Because one of the lessons we've learned is that program a time or developer time, that is your time, you know, the machine learning experience time is incredibly valuable. And if you can get your learning happens to work more quickly in Octave, then overall, you have a huge time savings by first developing the algorithms in Octave, and then implementing in like maybe C++ or Java only after we have the ideas working. The most common prototyping languages I see people use for machine learning are Octave, Matlab, Python NumPy, and R. Octave is nice since it's free open source and Matlab works well, too, but is expensive to many people. But if you have access to a copy of Matlab, you can also use Matlab for this class. If you know Python NumPy, or if you know R, I do see some people use it. But what I see is that people usually end up developing somewhat more slowly in, you know, mul, these languages because the Python NumPy syntax is just slightly concur than the Octave syntax. and so because of that and because we're releasing starter code in Octave I strongly recommend that you not try to do the programming exercises in this class and NumPy R, but that I do recommend that you instead do the programming exercises for this class in Octave instead. What we're going to do in this video is go through a list of commands fairly quickly, and the goal is to show you the range of commands and the range of things you can do in Octave. The course website will have a transcript of everything I do. And so after watching this video, you can refer to the, to the transcript posted on the course website when you want to find a command. Briefly, what I recommend you do is first watch the tutorial videos. And after watching, you know, to the end, then install Octave on your computer. And finally, go to the course website, download the transcript of the things you see in this session and type in whatever commands seem interesting to you in to the octaves of running on your own computer so that you can see it work for yourself. And with that, let's get started. Here's my Windows desktop, and I'm going to start an Octave. And I'm now in octave and, and there's my octave prompt. Let me first show you the elementary operations you can do in octave. So you can type in 56, + 6, that gives you the answer of 11. 3 - 2, 5 * 8, 1/2, 2^6 is 64. So, those are the elementary math operations. You can also do logical operations. So, 1 = 2 this evaluates to false. The percent command here is means a comment. So, 1 = 2 evaluates to false which is represented by zero. One not equals to two, this is true so that returns one, note that the not equal sign is tilde equals symbol and not than equals which is what some other program languages use. Let's see logical operations one and zero, use a double ampersand sign to denote the logical and, and that evaluates the false one over zero. z or operation, and that evaluates to true. And I can xor one and zero, and that evaluates to one. This thing over on the left is octave 3.2.4.exe:11. This is the default octave prompt. So it shows the what? a version in Octave, and so on. if you don't want that problem, there's a somewhat cryptic command, PS, quote, greater than, greater than, and so on, that you can use to change the prompt. And I guess this quote of string in the middle your quote greater than, greater than space, that's what I prefer my octave prompt to look like. So, if I hit Enter oops, excuse me. Like so, PS1 like so, now my octave prompt is changed to the greater than, greater than sign which, you know, looks quite a bit better. Next, let's talk about octave variables. I can take the variable a and assign it to three, and hit Enter. And now, a is equal to three. If you want to assign a variable but you don't want it to print out the result, if you put a semicolon, the semicolon suppresses the print the, the print output. So, if we do that, Enter, it doesn't print anything. Whereas a equals three, you know, makes it prints it out, whereas a equals three semicolon doesn't print anything. I can do string assignments, b equals hi. now, if I just enter b, it prints out the variable b, so b is the string hi. c3, equals three greater than or equal to one. So now, c evaluates to true. If you want to print out or display a variable, here's how you go about it. Let me set api. equals pi. And if I want to print a, I can just type a like so, and it'll print it out. For more complex printing, there's also the disp command which sense the displays, when display a, just prints out a like so. You can also display strings, so disp print f, two decimals. The percent of 0.2f, a like so. And this print out the string, 2 decimals: 3.14. This is kind of a old, old style C syntax for those of you that have coded in C before, this is essentially the syntax you used to print strings. So the, sprint f generator generates a, generates a string that is this, you know, two decimals 3.14 one for string. This percent 0.2f means substitute a into here, sharing it with, you know, two digits after the decimal point. And the disp takes this string that's generated by this print f command, s print f or the string print f command, and disp actually displays the string. And to show you another example, sprint f six decimals percent 0.6f, a and this should print pi with six decimal to, to six decimal places. Finally, I was explaining a like so, a lot like this. There, there are useful short cuts that you type format long. It causes strings to by default to be assuage to a lot more decimal places to and format short is a command that resources default of just printing a small number of digits. Okay. That's how you work with variables. Now, let's look at vectors and matrices. Let's say, I want to assign a to a matrix, let me show you an example. 12; 34; 56, this generates a three by two matrix a whose first row is one two, second row is three, four, the third row is five, six. What the semicolon does is essentially say, go to the next row of the matrix. There are other ways to type this, a=12;1 34;. 56 like so, and that's another equivalent way of assigning a to be the values of this three by two matrix. Similarly, you can assign vectors. So, v = 1,2,3. this is actually a row vector, or this is a three by one vector, right? This is a fat y vector, as a, excuse me, not, this is a one by three matrix, right? not three by one. If I want to assign this to a column vector, what I would do is instead do v1;2;3. = 1; 2; 3, and this will give me a three by one, instead of one by three vector. So this would be a column vector. So here's some more useful notation. I can all set v1:0.1:2. = 1:0.1:2. What this does is it sets v to the bunch of elements that start from one and increments in steps of 0.1 until you get up to two. So, I might do this. v is going to be this, you know, row vector or this is what? A one by eleven matrix really that's 1.1, one, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and so on until we get up to two. Now and I can also say that v1:6, = 1:6 and that set's v to v, you know, these numbers one through six. Okay. Now, here are some other ways to generating matrices. One's two by three, is a command that generates a matrix that is a two by three matrix that is the matrix of all ones. So, if I set c equals 2 times ones, two by three, this generates a two by three matrix that is all twos. And this is, you can think of it as a shorter way of writing this and c equals two, two, two, semicolon two, two, two, which would also give you the same result. The set w equals ones, one by three, so this is going to be a row vector or a you know, a row of three ones. And similarly, you can also say w equals zeroes one by three, and, this generates a matrix, a one by three matrix of all zeroes. Just a couple more ways to generate matrices. if I do w equals rand one by three, this gives me a one by three matrix of all random numbers. If I do rand three by three, this gives me a three by three matrix of all random numbers drawn from the uniform distribution between zero and one. So, every time I do this, I get a different set of random numbers drawn uniformly between zero and one. For those of that who know what a Gaussian random variable is or for those of you who know what a normal random variable is, you can also set w equals rand n one by three. and so these are going to be three values drawn from a Gaussian distribution with mean zero and variant or standard deviation equal to one. And you can set more complex things like w-6 = -6 plus square root of ten times let's say, rand n one by ten thousand, and I'm going to put a semicolon at the end because I don't really want this printed out. This is going to be what, well, it's going to be a vector with a hundred thousand excuse me, ten thousand elements. So, well, actually, you know what? Lets, lets print it out. So this will generate a matrix like this right? With 10,000 elements, so that's what w is. And if I now plot the histogram of w with the hist command, I can now, and octaves print hist command, you know, it takes a couple seconds to bring this up, but this is a histogram of my random variable for w. That was -6 plus zero, ten times this Gaussian random variable. And I can plot a histogram with more buckets with more bins with say, 50 bins and this is my histogram of Gaussian with mean minus six, because I have minus six there, plus square root ten times this. So, the the varians or, this, of, of this Gaussian random variable is ten over standard diviation, this square root of ten, which is about what? 3.1. Finally, one special command to generate a matrix, which is the eye command. So, eye stands for this is maybe a pun on the word identity, but so I'm going to set eye 4, this is the four by four identity matrix. So, I equals eye 4, this gives me a four by four identity matrix. And I equals eye 5 eye 6, that gives me a six by six identity matrix, and eye 3 is the three by three identity matrix. Lastly, to wrap up this video there's one more useful command which is the help command. So you can type help eye, and this brings up the help function for the identity matrix. hit q to quit. And you can also type help rand, brings up documentation for the rand or the random number generation function, or even help, help which shows you, you know, help on the help function. So, those are the basic operations in Octave. and with this you should be able to generate a few matrices multiply, add things and, and use the basic operations in Octave. In the next video, I'd like to start talking about more sophisticated commands and how to move data around and to start to process data in Octave.
