This week, my main task was debugging our issues with the machine learning model. During the carnival, I trained some preliminary models, but their performance was not that good in real time. To compensate for this issue, I tested a variety of architectures as well as new activation functions. I also manually selected the new words that I determined were more easily mixed up and created a smaller simpler model for just those words. This allowed me to develop a two-model approach to classification that leveraged the original model’s strength at half of the vocab and the more narrow model’s strength for the rest. I also developed a model that handled time series data by stitching in the previous five frames of data as one input into the NN model. Armed with the variety of models, I entered this weekend with the plan of testing them all. I was able to determine that the two-model approach performed the best, being able to determine 10/11 of the words consistently. This was not a 100% rigorous set of tests, but it gave me enough metrics to assist with our final presentation slides, so I was content with that performance as of now.
My progress is on schedule.
Next week, I will narrow down which model I will use for our final demo with a more rigorous and formal testing of the two approaches. I will also assist in the development of the poster by adding additional pictures from the ML side. I will also assist with the video and the report.
Addressing the additional question, I definitely needed to relearn how to work with ARDUINOs and learn about how to interface between ARDUINO and Python. Since I handled the bulk of the Bluetooth and the machine learning side, I did need to handle a lot of the communication between the two platforms. This meant that I had to consult many pages of ARDUINO documentation as well as perform extensive research into compatible Python libraries. For learning strategies, most of it was on reading documentation and reading StackOverflow. I did watch a few videos of other example projects for assistance as well.