Machine Learning in Elixir

Classifying Flowers

Imagine you’ve been hired by a botanist. Your job is to automate the classification of the Iris genus into one class from a set of species. You must also prove that your system has a minimum success rate of 85%.

The botanist has already automated the process of collecting and measuring the flowers but cannot invest time into classifying each one individually. Instead, they’ve given you a dataset consisting of 50 examples each of the seneca, versicolor, and virginica species of the Iris genus—150 examples total. Each example contains the sepal length (cm), sepal width (cm), petal length (cm), petal width (cm), and species.

With a clear mission and some data in hand, it’s time to write your first machine learning algorithm. ...