[HN Gopher] Create, train and run Scikit-learn and TensorFlow mo...
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       Create, train and run Scikit-learn and TensorFlow models in Excel
        
       Author : faja2000
       Score  : 75 points
       Date   : 2021-09-25 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (predictionlaboratory.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (predictionlaboratory.com)
        
       | kzrdude wrote:
       | (Serious question) The video voiceover is a speech synthesis,
       | right? Or is it a really consistent/plain talking person?
        
         | faja2000 wrote:
         | Yes, Google-cloud/text-to-speech en-US-Wavenet-J
        
       | punnerud wrote:
       | Inspired by the excel examples from the (free) fast.ai course?
       | https://github.com/fastai/courses/tree/master/deeplearning1/...
        
       | jonbaer wrote:
       | Just a question about these type of apps/plugins, when it says
       | something like this: "Add-in capabilities When this add-in is
       | used, it Can read and make changes to your document Can send data
       | over the Internet" is that isolated to just the pane you are
       | currently on with the plugin?
        
         | faja2000 wrote:
         | Yes, the data is only read from the active worksheet. And your
         | data is not sent over the internet. The trained model is stored
         | on a server, but your data stays on your machine.
        
       | streamofdigits wrote:
       | The spreadsheet is a killer app that nobody has yet figured out
       | how it fits in the new era. Godspeed with your venture but keep
       | in mind that scikit-learn has been built by an open source
       | community.
        
       | alexcnwy wrote:
       | Looks interesting.
       | 
       | BTW you can hack together something similar with the excellent
       | ExcelDNA C# library.
        
       | narush wrote:
       | Super cool. This is the opposite angle from the approach we're
       | taking at Mito [1].
       | 
       | Instead of extending Excel to support more advanced
       | functionality, we're extending Python environments to support
       | more basic spreadsheet functionality. So: basic Python users
       | doing data science can use a point and click environment that
       | they are more familiar with.
       | 
       | Interesting difference in user base as a result of this opposite
       | approach. I also don't envy you building an Excel add-in... we
       | tried that first and didn't love it :-)
       | 
       | [1] https://trymito.io/hn
        
       | digitcatphd wrote:
       | This is really incredible and brings enormous democratization to
       | AI/ML applications.
        
       | avnigo wrote:
       | *using an Excel addon
       | 
       | Great nonetheless, and not to take anything away from the
       | project, but I guess what I was expecting from the title, however
       | ambitious, was an Excel-native solution.
        
         | im_down_w_otp wrote:
         | Blargh. Me too. I was really hoping this was a deep-dive into
         | an incredible, if beautifully deranged, misuse of Excel.
        
           | nerdponx wrote:
           | I've heard legends of people fitting shallow feedforward NNs
           | with pure Excel formulas.
           | 
           | I once interned for an economist who was using recursive
           | Excel formulas for some kind of iterative optimization
           | algorithm. I don't remember what it was, probably some
           | iterative least squares thing.
           | 
           | I also was a research assistant for an economist who fit
           | linear regressions with hand-written routines in Matlab. For
           | some reason they felt more comfortable using Matlab's QR
           | decomposition instead of just using the built-in linear
           | modeling tools in R or even Stata.
           | 
           | Some people just want to use their favorite tool even if it
           | makes no sense to do so.
        
             | 7thaccount wrote:
             | Doesn't Matlab fit equations like that easily in a built-in
             | fashion? Why use hand written routines?
        
       | zhte415 wrote:
       | Now absolutely no one doesn't have an excuse not to add AI to
       | their resume. Right after MS Word, MS Powerpoint and MS Excel.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | Guest42 wrote:
         | Perhaps Microsoft can add it to their certs list and start
         | competing with the tier 1 grad schools.
         | 
         | I remember a newly hired ex-consultant have a slide in her deck
         | about using ML across sparse/inaccurate company data and how
         | this would turn "data into information." I think eventually
         | they realized that it takes more than PowerPoints and repeating
         | that phrase.
        
       | savant_penguin wrote:
       | Finally machine learning with Excel
       | 
       | I'd love to see some integration with cloud services for model
       | deploy
       | 
       | The workflow email>Excel>CodePipeline>AWS deploy looks really
       | funny and possible
        
         | axpy906 wrote:
         | I would be curious what deployment would look like here...
         | Would it be uploading the model back to the cloud to run
         | inference for other users - like a marketplace?
        
         | bfung wrote:
         | You think that's funny, but from experience, I'd tell you this
         | happens more often than you think.
         | 
         | A company I was with, that was a startup and then IPO'd, our
         | pipeline involved an open office spreadsheet "deployed" (copy)
         | onto the server, where then the Java webapp (war+tomcat) would
         | read the inputs to calculate for millions of people, user
         | classifier and what kind of robocall they should get in case of
         | a utility event to prevent brownouts.
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-25 23:01 UTC)