Machine Learning, etc

Suppose we'd like to visualize a set of joint probabilities realizable by distributions of 3 binary variables. It is a 7 dimensional reg...

One approach to solving hard problems is to break them into computationally efficient parts. For instance, Globerson/Jaakkola do approximat...

A few "connection to other fields" papers I found interesting Variational Inference over Combinatorial Spaces. Alexandre Bouchard...

Most graphics and formulas that appear in this blog were created with help of Mathematica. I'll keep a separate blog with Mathematica t...

Common complaint about current publishing model is that sometimes good papers get rejected. A striking example is that David Lowe's SIFT...

In order to do exact probabilistic inference on real life network efficiently, one must find a good Tree Decomposition of the network. This ...

Link here . If you never heard of the journal "Machine Learning", it used to be number 1 ranked journal in ML, until board of edit...

I just came across kaggle.com which is a platform for "s a platform for data prediction competitions." From brief glance, it seem...

Ulrich Bodenhofer has made some nifty SVM visualization code . One is Mathematica notebooks that takes libSVM model files and visualizes the...

Searching for "NIPS" in google blog-search mainly produces posts about nipples, my "CRF" subscription on delicious rece...

In 1993, R.Holte noted that "Very simple classification rules perform well on most commonly used datasets" . His very simple rules...

Suresh points out that at this year's FOCS , not a single person wanted printed proceedings, whereas few years ago, a third of the audi...

David Mimno fit a Dirichlet-multinomial to ICML papers 2004-2008. Seems like "real world" problems are going strong, while boosti...

A comment on previous post asked why we need integrals for computer science. One reason is that combinatorial expressions often have represe...

Thanks to John Cook for pointing it out Theoretical CS cheat sheet

Terry Tao's article on universality. Stephen Wolfram's speech on future special functions. They give opposing perspective -- in th...

Suppose I have an invertible function $f(x)$. In a perfect world, the following holds $$x=f(f^{-1}(x))=f^{-1}(f(x))$$ To see what happens in...

I recently raked the blogosphere for interesting new Machine Learning/math blogs and got a high recall, low precision list of 87, here .

Suppose X is distributed as n-dimensional Gaussian with 0 mean and concentration matrix $A$ and you need conditional distribution of $P(\mat...

Foundations of probabilistic inference is often a subject of much disagreement, with some leading Bayesian sometimes going as far as to say ...

Suppose we throw a fair coin n times and estimate it's bias by averaging the number of heads observed. What is the squared error of this...

By Frank Nielsen, with focus on information geometry, http://blog.informationgeometry.org/

After following some discussions on overflow sites, I re-read Shannon/Cover's coverage of method of types, and want to summarize it he...

As I discovered recently, stack exchanges can be pretty fun, informative (and time consuming!) way to discuss issues related to machine lea...

I used the "Robust OCR dataset" below to make a system for reading runner bibs in video. Standard ML techniques give fairly good r...

I've collected this dataset for a project that involves automatically reading bibs in pictures of marathons and other races. This datase...

This seems to be a fairly comprehensive vision bibliography. I found a few articles on text localization there that I didn't find throug...

I've started a new job at MyStrands.com, looking at mining financial data. I also applied to Wolfram Research at the same time, but they...

Here's a side to side comparison of 150 vs. 300 vs. 600 DPI scan viewed at 400% magnification. On a local library scanner, 600 DPI blac...

Newton once wrote to Hooke: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". It's true nowdays more than...

Pi comes up in the most unexpected places. Here's an application to walk counting that involves it. Suppose you have a chain of length n...

A few weeks ago , I brought up a Russian CAPTCHA that asks to find resistance between end-points in a version of Wheatstone bridge in order...

I was going to post this to Wolfram's Demonstrations website , but then I realized it doesn't fit some technical format limitations,...

Maximum entropy principle is the idea that we should should pick a distribution maximizing entropy subject to certain constraints. Many know...

Here's an innovative CAPTCHA I came across when trying to register for a forum at http://lib.mipt.ru/?spage=reg_user You have to enter r...

Stochastic matrices are easy to get -- just normalize the rows. Doubly stochastic matrices require more work -- simply normalizing columns/r...

Consider a distribution over 6 binary random variables captured by the structure below. Red represents -1 potential, green represents +1 pot...

Ising Models are important for Machine Learning because they are well-studied physical counter-parts of binary valued undirected graphical m...

As mentioned in another post belief propagation is a an important algorithm both in probabilistic inference, and statistical thermodynamics...