Description
- The NIPS conference (Neural Information Processing Systems) is one of the most prestigious yearly events in the machine learning community. At each NIPS conference, a large number of research papers are published. Over 50,000 PDF files were automatically downloaded and processed to obtain a dataset on various machine learning techniques. These NIPS papers are stored in datasets/papers.csv. The CSV file contains information on the different NIPS papers that were published from 1987 until 2017 (30 years!). These papers discuss a wide variety of topics in machine learning, from neural networks to optimization methods and many more.
Evolution of Machine Learning
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Plotting the Evolution of Machine Learning over time.
- In order to understand how the machine learning field has recently exploded in popularity, we will begin by visualizing the number of publications per year.By looking at the number of published papers per year, we can understand the extent of the machine learning 'revolution'! Typically, this significant increase in popularity is attributed to the large amounts of compute power, data and improvements in algorithms.
Word Cloud
- In order to verify whether the preprocessing happened correctly, we can make a word cloud of the titles of the research papers. This will give us a visual representation of the most common words. Visualisation is key to understanding whether we are still on the right track! In addition, it allows us to verify whether we need additional preprocessing before further analyzing the text data.
- Python has a massive number of open libraries! Instead of trying to develop a method to create word clouds ourselves, we'll use Andreas Mueller's Wordcloud library.
Future of Machine Learning
- Machine learning has become increasingly popular over the past years. The number of NIPS conference papers has risen exponentially, and people are continuously looking for ways on how they can incorporate machine learning into their products and services.Although this analysis focused on analyzing machine learning trends in research, a lot of these techniques are rapidly being adopted in industry. Following the latest machine learning trends is a critical skill for a data scientist, and it is recommended to continuously keep learning by going through blogs, tutorials, and courses.