Reading & Eating

Posted on Fri 05 January 2018 in Blog • Tagged with food, reading&eating

Reading

  1. I formed a Reinforcement Learning study group at work, so I've been watching and reading materials curated by Denny Britz. For a short intro to RL, read: a) Karpathy's "Pong From Pixels" b) A bit more in-depth: "Demystifying Deep RL"
  2. Tom Holland's Rubicon, a fantastic book ...
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Easy Optimization With Evolutionary Strategies

Posted on Tue 30 May 2017 in Blog • Tagged with Machine Learning

I recently read Ferenc Huszár's blog post summarizing recent research on how evolutionary strategies can be used in place of gradient descent or back-propagation. That research focuses on how evolutionary strategies for reinforcement learning get the same results as back-propagation, but the computation is more parallelizable and therefore faster ...

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Machine Learning Without Code

Posted on Wed 15 February 2017 in Blog • Tagged with Machine Learning

I've grown increasingly frustrated with the way the popular press talks about Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Too many articles talk about Machine Learning (ML) as a sci-fi black box capable of doing and learning anything, and leave the reader with a poorer understanding of what ML is than ...

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Machine Learning From Scratch

Posted on Tue 03 January 2017 in Blog • Tagged with Machine Learning

A self-lead refresher course in basic ML algorithms

I'm in the process of implementing various machine learning algorithms from scratch.

For now the algorithms include:

  • Regression (logistic and least squares) via gradient descent

  • Decision Trees

  • Random Forests

I'll be benchmarking these algorithms on the handwritten digits dataset that ...

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Reading & Eating

Posted on Mon 02 January 2017 in Blog • Tagged with food, reading&eating

Reading

  1. Andrej Karpathy reminds you that "Yes you should understand backprop". For an intuitive and in-depth intro to backpropogation I recommend his convolutional neural network lectures.
  2. Bill Bryson - The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way , an entertaining if sometimes undirected tour through the history of the English ...
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Fun With Presidential Probabilities

Posted on Wed 06 July 2016 in Blog • Tagged with Statistics

Please don't try to read into this blog post any political beliefs or agenda. This is simply an exercise in conditional probabilities.

In case you're on the internet for the first time this year, this election has been... different. For example, there's talk about how GOP convention ...

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Reading & Eating

Posted on Sun 03 July 2016 in Blog • Tagged with food, reading&eating

I'm trying out a new idea for blog posts - an occasional (monthly?) series on what I'm reading and what I'm eating.

Reading

  1. If the first 11 socks I pull out of the dryer all are distinct, how many total socks are in the dryer? Rasmus Baath explains ...
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Finding a Confidence Interval for Lift

Posted on Sun 05 June 2016 in Blog • Tagged with Statistics

This blog post has been cross-posted from here to Magnetic's tech blog.

Note: this post doesn't describe original mathematical research on my part. My initial motivation to write this post was simply that I was surprised by how hard it was to find a formula for the confidence ...

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First Blog Post

Posted on Sat 21 May 2016 in Blog

This is my first blog post.

I used Pelican to build this. Stay tuned for ML and/or tacos.

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