ML4T Software Installation

Overview

There are two main environments available to you to develop and test your code for this class:

1. An Ubuntu Linux image we have created that you can run in a VM on your machine
2. One of several high performance machines at Georgia Tech

Both of these have been set up with the same, correct software libraries. Your code MUST run properly in one of these environments, otherwise it may not run correctly in our auto grader. If your code fails to run in the auto grader environment, you might not get credit for the assignment. So it is very important that you ensure that you have access to one of these environments.

You may, for convenience, choose to also manually install the software on your personal machine. Keep in mind, however, that this is not officially supported and it is at your own risk: ML4T_Software_Manual_Installation

Important note: We use a specific, static dataset for this course, which we will provide. If you download your own data from Yahoo (or elsewhere), you will get wrong answers on assignments.

Install, set up and test a virtual machine

If you don't want to connect remotely to GT machines, we have created a VM image with the same operating system and software libraries that you can download (link coming soon) and run using VirtualBox, Oracle's open source VMM. The credentials for the main account on this image use ml4t (case sensitive) as both the username and password, should you need to make changes. This image is configured without any optimizations enabled to be as platform agnostic as possible, but we encourage you to enable hardware acceleration, graphics acceleration, and guest additions to improve performance (changing the virtual disk image from dynamically allocated to fixed may also improve performance).

Access to machines at Georgia Tech

We will configure machines at Georgia Tech so that you can connect to them remotely using your GT login credentials. These machines are usually not available during the first week of class. To connect to one of these machines, open a terminal window (or DOS window) and type:

xhost +
ssh -X gtname@buffet0X.cc.gatech.edu

You will then be asked for your password and be logged in. In order to distribute workload across the machines, please use the specific machines as follows:

• buffet01.cc.gatech.edu if your last name begins with A-F
• buffet02.cc.gatech.edu if your last name begins with G-L
• buffet03.cc.gatech.edu if your last name begins with M-R
• buffet04.cc.gatech.edu if your last name begins with S-Z

Optional software

• IPython [link]
• A Python IDE, such as PyCharm or Spyder

Data

• Download: ml4t.zip
  Note: If you downloaded this prior to Aug 21, 2015, please download again. Some missing files have been included and minor issues fixed.
• Unzip it. That should create a ml4t/ directory with the following contents:

   ml4t
   ├── data
   │   ├── $DJI.csv
   │   ├── $SPX.csv
   │   ├── $VIX.csv
   │   ├── A.csv
   │   ├── AA.csv
   │   ├── AAPL.csv
   │   ├── ...
   │   ├── YHOO.csv
   │   ├── YUM.csv
   │   ├── ZION.csv
   │   └── ZMH.csv
   └── validate_env.py

Whenever you need to work on assignments for this class, run your program from within ml4t/ so that you can access data/*.csv using a relative path.

Test installation

Test your environment by running the script validate_env.py from the ml4t/ directory:

   python validate_env.py

If it complains, or if any of the installed library versions are older than the desired versions, fix the problems, and then repeat.

A clean output from validate_env.py is required for MC1-Homework-2.