The LA Machine Learning Meetup began with events discussing a large variety of machine learning topics such as classification, clustering, neural networks, graphical algorithms, information retrieval, search, game theory, computational learning theory, reinforcement learning, collaborative filtering etc. More recently, a Data Science Track was launched with the focus on business applications and the entire process of data mining (e.g. business understanding, data collection, exploratory data analysis, data transformations, feature engineering, modeling, model validation, deployment, communication of results). While in fact Machine Learning is a part of Data Science and not the other way around, rather than starting a new meetup group, Data Science is featured within the already existing Machine Learning meetup.
Many of us here in the DataScience.LA Team were also involved in organizing the useR! 2014 conference, the annual get-together of the wonderful R community, which brought over 700 R users and developers from all over the world to Los Angeles this past July.
R is an open source software and programming language for data analysis, statistical modeling, visualization and data mining among other things. Recently, as the term “data science” has emerged to describe collectively these tasks, R has also become the primary tool of choice for data scientists. The LA R meetup began before this data science boom, back in 2009, by bringing together local users of R and featuring talks with world-class speakers while creating fruitful networking opportunities for its members. In retrospect, this group served as the very first data science meetup in Los Angeles and has significantly contributed to the development of our local data science community.
Welcome! We are launching DataScience.LA to provide a home for all the content (slides, code, videos etc.) for several meetups in LA (Data Science/Machine Learning, R, DataVis etc.) and to engage the Los Angeles data science community in an open, active discussion about best practices and new developments in the field.
