This work is to build a machine learning system to categorise one of the UCI digit tasks. You should develop the system on your own from scratch. You should then run a two-fold test, and report your results.
The data is from the University of California at Irvine's Machine Learning Repository. It's the Optical Recognition of Handwritten Digits Data Set. This gives you two data sets, training set and a test set. I've converted them to two data sets data set 1 , and data set 2 that should be used by your system.
You should write all of your code. If you use an existing algorithm, you should reference that algorithm in your code and in your report. The code should be written in Java, and should run in the lab from eclipse.
Marking scheme: Points Area 20 Report 20 Running Code 20 Quality of Code 20 Quality of Algorithm 20 Quality of Results
You should write a brief (1-2 page) report on your system. This should describe the algorithm you used, and why you chose this algorithm. It should also show the results of a two fold test using the provided data; a brief discussion of data usage would be useful.
Quality of code and algorithm are important for good marks. The code should be well commented and structured. Selection of a good algorithm is also important. Simple algorithms may be effective, but a relatively complex algorithm may get you more points just for effort.
Finally, the quality of the results do matter. To get reasonable marks you need to surpass the baseline reported on the UCI website. This is not a competition between students, but discussing performance with your colleagues will be useful.
Note for scraping by: the base line reported on UCI website is nearest neighbor using Euclidean distance. You should be able to implement this quite easily (and might want to start with this). This should be enough to pass (10 report, 20 running, 10 code, and 5 results).
Please submit the code, the mark sheet, and analysis to unihelp in the Sheppard Library; get a receipt. You are also welcome to email a copy to the tutor.