Open Source Contribution - Release 0.2.1


Contributing to AlgoWiki


AlgoWiki is a project that attempts to bring together resources on different topics and different programming languages surrounding the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence. These resources include websites, books, articles, and other resources that are helpful for people beginning to learn machine learning and artificial intelligence, and is a good reference for the people who are already experienced in these fields.

Hacktoberfest 2018

This year I am participating in Hacktoberfest. Throughout the month of October, I will need to make 5 pull requests with contributions to one or more projects on Github. This is my first contribution to Hacktoberfest and I decided to explore a different way of contributing to open source. While my first contribution consisted of code to a programming project, this time I decided to contribute knowledge resources to a project that attempts to create a knowledge base.

Contributing to Open Source is not Just About Code

In order to contribute to the open source community, one is not limited to just code contributions. Programming projects also require people to write documentation, tutorials, translations of their material to other languages, and etc. In addition, there are also projects like AlgoWiki that try to put out educational material for others to use.

Contributing to such projects is also important because it provides tools for learning new topics that people might be interested in. And you can contribute what you already know or need to research for yourself. By doing so, you improve your own abilities on a certain topic, while sharing your knowledge with fellow programmers.


My Contribution

A moderator of AlgoWiki has posted an issue asking to add resources to their Machine Learning folder for Hacktoberfest. To which I responded with a contribution I had in mind. I recently had to research about Association Learning and Apriori Algorithm for my job. When reading about these two topics, I realized that the traditional machine learning libraries that are well known do not include Apriori algorithm. Furthermore, AlgoWiki had no resources on these two topics, so I went ahead and added what I came across to their Machine Learning folder.

Link to the issue:

Link to the pull request:


List of things that I added to AlgoWiki:
  • Apriori algorithm to the list of algorithms.
  • Link to the MLxtend library, which includes apriori algorithm
  • Link to a website with an article on association learning and apriori algorithm
  • Link to a dataset that can be used with apriori algorithm and association learning

Conclusion


Throughout the next four remaining contributions of Hacktoberfest I will be focusing on coding challenges. However for the first contribution, I wanted to do something different and show you that a contribution does not have to consist of code to be useful to the open source community.


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