I don't mind it. It's well known from teaching that reading about something and actually doing something (even if it is the same something) is incredibly important. I find that writing the MATLAB code, even if it's just translating a known formula, has helped my understanding of ML overall.
On top of this, writing the Octave code lets me see line by line what the algorithm is doing as well, and it's a quick way to gain insight into the ML approaches by seeing exactly what each intermediate step is doing.
Finally, even when it's a "translation" I find that it's not that trivial to do. Seeing a formula on a page and being able to write that as vectorized MATLAB code has also been an interesting challenge.
Comments
I don't mind it. It's well known from teaching that reading about something and actually doing something (even if it is the same something) is incredibly important. I find that writing the MATLAB code, even if it's just translating a known formula, has helped my understanding of ML overall.
On top of this, writing the Octave code lets me see line by line what the algorithm is doing as well, and it's a quick way to gain insight into the ML approaches by seeing exactly what each intermediate step is doing.
Finally, even when it's a "translation" I find that it's not that trivial to do. Seeing a formula on a page and being able to write that as vectorized MATLAB code has also been an interesting challenge.