Data, Analytics & AI

Articles about data, analytics, and AI, including machine learning, data visualization, and AI applications.

637 items · Page 4 of 14

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Michael Brenndoerfer
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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

QA: Extractive, Generative, and Open-Domain QA

Jan 26, 2026·59 min read

Covers question answering systems from span extraction with BERT to retrieval-augmented generation, covering evaluation metrics and open-domain QA pipelines.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Vector Similarity Search: Metrics & Approximate Methods

Jan 25, 2026·65 min read

Examines vector similarity search for RAG systems. Compare cosine, dot product, and Euclidean metrics, and implement exact vs. approximate search with FAISS.

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Quantitative FinanceData, Analytics & AISoftware Engineering

Case Study: Building a Quantitative Strategy from Scratch

Jan 25, 2026·51 min read

Walk through the complete lifecycle of a quantitative trading strategy. Build a pairs trading system from scratch with rigorous backtesting and risk management.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Learning Rate Decay: Step, Exponential

Jan 24, 2026·51 min read

Explains how learning rate schedules improve neural network training. Topics include step decay, exponential decay, inverse square root with warmup.

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Quantitative FinanceSoftware EngineeringData, Analytics & AI

Ethical Quant Trading: Regulations & Market Manipulation

Jan 24, 2026·61 min read

Covers ethical quantitative trading by learning to detect spoofing, navigate Reg NMS and MiFID II, implement kill switches, and ensure data privacy compliance.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Embedding Models: Architecture, Pooling & Selection

Jan 24, 2026·65 min read

Explains how embedding models convert text to vectors for RAG. Topics include bi-encoder architecture, pooling strategies, dimensionality trade-offs.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningQuantitative Finance

Position Sizing & Leverage: Kelly Criterion Strategy

Jan 23, 2026·48 min read

Covers optimal position sizing using the Kelly Criterion, risk budgeting, and volatility targeting.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Document Chunking: Optimizing RAG Retrieval Pipelines

Jan 23, 2026·63 min read

Covers document chunking for RAG systems. Examines fixed-size, recursive, and semantic strategies to balance retrieval precision with context window limits.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Checkpointing and Recovery: Async I/O and Fault Tolerance

Jan 23, 2026·53 min read

Save and restore complete training state, choose checkpoint frequency, implement asynchronous I/O, and recover distributed LLM training runs from failures.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Contrastive Learning for Retrieval: InfoNCE and DPR

Jan 23, 2026·57 min read

Covers contrastive learning for dense retrieval. Train models using InfoNCE loss, in-batch negatives, and hard negative mining strategies effectively.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Communication Optimization: Gradient Compression, NCCL

Jan 23, 2026·55 min read

Covers distributed training communication: gradient compression, topology-aware all-reduce, NCCL tuning.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Mixed Precision Training: FP16, BF16, and Loss Scaling

Jan 22, 2026·58 min read

Explains how mixed precision training uses FP16 and BF16 floating point formats to speed up LLM training and cut memory usage without sacrificing accuracy.

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Quantitative FinanceSoftware EngineeringData, Analytics & AI

Research Pipeline: From Strategy to Deployment

Jan 22, 2026·62 min read

Build a robust quantitative research pipeline. From hypothesis formulation and backtesting to paper trading and live production deployment strategies.

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Machine LearningData, Analytics & AILanguage AI Handbook

Dense Retrieval: Semantic Search & Bi-Encoder Implementation

Jan 22, 2026·62 min read

Covers dense retrieval for semantic search. Examines bi-encoder architectures, embedding metrics, and contrastive learning to overcome keyword limitations.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Activation Checkpointing: Gradient Memory

Jan 22, 2026·56 min read

How activation checkpointing trades compute for memory by discarding and recomputing activations.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

FSDP: Fully Sharded Data Parallel Training at Scale

Jan 22, 2026·47 min read

Explains how FSDP shards model parameters, gradients, and optimizer states across GPUs to train billion-parameter models.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

ZeRO Optimization: Stages 1, 2, and 3 Explained

Jan 21, 2026·46 min read

Explains how ZeRO eliminates memory redundancy in distributed training by partitioning optimizer states, gradients, and parameters.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

RAG Architecture: Components, Timing & Design Patterns

Jan 21, 2026·60 min read

Covers RAG system design by exploring retriever-generator interactions, timing strategies like iterative retrieval, and architectural variations like RETRO.

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Quantitative FinanceSoftware EngineeringData, Analytics & AI

Quant Trading Systems: Architecture & Infrastructure

Jan 21, 2026·65 min read

Examines quantitative trading-system architecture, including data pipelines, strategy engines, risk controls, and execution infrastructure.

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Data, Analytics & AIMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

RAG Motivation: Solving Hallucinations & Knowledge Gaps

Jan 20, 2026·59 min read

Explains why LLMs need Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Explains how RAG bridges knowledge gaps, reduces hallucinations, and enables non-parametric memory.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Pipeline Parallelism: Stages, Micro-Batching, GPipe, 1F1B

Jan 20, 2026·54 min read

Explains how pipeline parallelism splits deep models across devices, manages bubble overhead with micro-batching, and compares GPipe vs 1F1B schedules.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Text Summarization: Extractive and Abstractive Methods

Jan 19, 2026·67 min read

Covers extractive and abstractive summarization, from TextRank and MMR to BART and LLMs, with ROUGE and BERTScore evaluation techniques.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Tensor Parallelism: Column, Row, and Megatron Patterns

Jan 19, 2026·50 min read

Explains how tensor parallelism splits weight matrices across GPUs using column and row strategies, enabling training of models too large for any single device.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

LLM Inference Serving: Architecture, Routing & Auto-Scaling

Jan 19, 2026·73 min read

Covers LLM inference serving architecture, token-aware load balancing, and auto-scaling. Optimize time-to-first-token and throughput for production systems.

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Data, Analytics & AIMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Continuous Batching: Optimizing LLM Inference Throughput

Jan 18, 2026·58 min read

Explains how continuous batching achieves 2-3x throughput gains in LLM inference through iteration-level scheduling, eliminating static batch inefficiencies.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Speculative Decoding Math: Algorithms & Speedup Limits

Jan 17, 2026·52 min read

Covers the mathematical framework for speculative decoding, including the exact acceptance criterion, rejection sampling logic.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Activation Patching: Causal Tracing in Neural Networks

Jan 16, 2026·49 min read

Explains how activation patching locates where information flows in transformers through causal tracing, path patching, and component attribution experiments.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Data Parallelism: DDP, Gradient Synchronization & All-Reduce

Jan 16, 2026·61 min read

Explains how DDP trains large models across multiple GPUs using ring all-reduce gradient synchronization, gradient bucketing.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Speculative Decoding

Jan 16, 2026·54 min read

Speculative decoding uses a smaller draft model to propose tokens that a larger model verifies in parallel, reducing latency without changing output quality.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Memory Management: Activations, Gradients

Jan 16, 2026·47 min read

Explains how GPU memory breaks down into parameters, gradients, optimizer states, and activations. Estimate memory requirements and debug out-of-memory errors.

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Data, Analytics & AIMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

GGUF: Storage and Inference for Quantized LLMs

Jan 15, 2026·55 min read

Covers GGUF format for storing quantized LLMs. Topics include file structure, quantization types, llama.cpp integration.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Creative Applications: Writing, Poetry, and Narrative AI

Jan 14, 2026·64 min read

Explains how language models power creative writing, poetry generation, storytelling, and the ethical questions of authorship and originality in generative AI.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

GPU Architecture: Memory Hierarchy, CUDA and Tensor Cores

Jan 14, 2026·53 min read

Covers GPU memory hierarchy, CUDA cores, Tensor Core throughput, and how to read GPU specs to optimize training workloads and debug performance bottlenecks.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

AWQ: Protecting Salient Weights for Efficient LLM Inference

Jan 14, 2026·44 min read

Explains how Activation-aware Weight Quantization protects salient weights to compress LLMs. Topics include the algorithm, scaling factors.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Jailbreaking LLMs: Techniques, Attacks, and Defenses

Jan 13, 2026·61 min read

Explains how adversarial prompts bypass LLM safety training, covering roleplay attacks, GCG gradient-based suffixes, PAIR automation.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Feature Interpretation: SAE Features, Naming, and Circuits

Jan 13, 2026·57 min read

Interpret sparse autoencoder features through activation patterns, automated naming, monosemanticity measurement, and causal feature circuit analysis.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

GPTQ: Optimizing 4-Bit Weight Quantization for LLMs

Jan 13, 2026·49 min read

Explains how GPTQ optimizes weight quantization using Hessian-based error compensation to compress LLMs to 4 bits while maintaining near-FP16 accuracy.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Synthetic Data: Generation, Quality, Diversity, Distillation

Jan 13, 2026·65 min read

Explains how LLMs are trained on synthetic data, from Self-Instruct and Evol-Instruct to quality verification, diversity control, and knowledge distillation.

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Machine LearningLanguage AI HandbookData, Analytics & AI

INT4 Quantization: Group-wise Methods & NF4 Format for LLMs

Jan 12, 2026·59 min read

Covers INT4 quantization techniques for LLMs. Topics include group-wise quantization, NF4 format, double quantization.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Data Mixing: Domain Proportions, Quality Weighting

Jan 11, 2026·59 min read

Construct effective pretraining data recipes by setting domain proportions, applying quality weighting, running proxy experiments.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

PII Removal: Detection, Redaction, and Privacy Preservation

Jan 10, 2026·53 min read

Detect and remove personal information from LLM training data with regex, named entity recognition, and hybrid privacy pipelines.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Toxicity Filtering: Classifiers, Thresholds

Jan 10, 2026·49 min read

Explains how toxicity classifiers work, how to calibrate thresholds for pretraining data.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Quality Filtering: Heuristics, Perplexity, and Classifiers

Jan 10, 2026·50 min read

Filter low-quality text from web corpora using heuristic rules, perplexity scoring, and classifier-based methods with tunable thresholds.

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Language AI HandbookMachine LearningData, Analytics & AI

Weight Quantization Basics: Scale, Zero-Point & Calibration

Jan 10, 2026·59 min read

Explains how weight quantization maps floating-point values to integers, reducing LLM memory by 4x. Topics include scale, zero-point.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

MinHash: Jaccard Similarity, LSH, Near-Duplicate Detection

Jan 10, 2026·47 min read

Explains how MinHash compresses documents into compact signatures that estimate Jaccard similarity, enabling near-duplicate detection.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Language Identification: Models, Multilingual Handling

Jan 10, 2026·52 min read

Explains how language identification works in NLP pipelines. Topics include n-gram models, FastText LID, code-switching, confidence thresholds.

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Data, Analytics & AIMachine LearningMachine Learning from Scratch

Hypothesis Testing: Test Selection and Reporting

Jan 10, 2026·18 min read

Practical reporting guidelines, summary of key concepts, test selection parameters table, multiple comparison corrections table.

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Data, Analytics & AISoftware EngineeringMachine LearningLanguage AI Handbook

Document Extraction with Trafilatura and HTML Parsing

Jan 9, 2026·55 min read

Extract clean text from HTML and PDFs for LLM training data. Topics include boilerplate removal, text density algorithms, Trafilatura.

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Community

Learn with the community

Create a free account to keep your reading organized, join thoughtful discussions, and get more from every chapter.

  • Keep your place across books and articles
  • Ask questions and take part in discussions
  • Read with fewer interruptions

Free to join · Takes less than a minute

Why

I created this space so readers can learn together, ask questions, and make sense of difficult ideas.

Michael Brenndoerfer
From readers1 / 12