Mathy Ng Lecture 4: Newton's Method, Exponential Family Distributions, GLMs
Ng Lecture 4: Newton's Method, Exponential Family Distributions, GLMs.
Newton's Method
Continue reading →Lecture 3 of Andrew Ng's mathier ML course
Lecture 3 – locally weighted regression
Nonparametric algorithms reduce "the need to choose features very carefully" (I guess that makes sense if you think of features as mathematical transformations on stuff observed rather than stuff observed in general... a nonparemetric algorithm surely can't avoid the fact that you left something off, though I guess it can help avoid the fact that you threw a bunch of extra stuff in...)
Continue reading →Translating Game Theory Backward Induction into a Tree Algorithm
I know a lot more about game theory than I do about graphs/trees/etc. (Political scientist, yo.) So here's an attempt at a translation of the idea of backwards induction into tree terms.
First, intuition/background: backwards induction is a method for finding subgame perfect equilibria of a sequential game in extensive form. (For simplicity, let's assume a perfect information game.) The short version is that, starting at the terminal node, you set the last player's choice for that node as the choice that yields the best they can achieve given the history of play leading up to that node. With that information, you now know the values for each choice of the second-to-last node for the second-to-last player, so set their choice to that. And so on, inductively.
Continue reading →A Flexbox Trick for Responsive Icon Screens
Here's a trick I just cooked up (well, it's probably widely known by, like, everyone on earth who regularly does css stuff, but I just discovered it for me, so I'll take a tiny bit of credit.).
Suppose you want to start off your site with an icon screen, like an iPhone or something. (I'm actually basing the design of my new website, in progress, on the old Palm Pilot home screen. Though I just moved away from the green, so maybe not anymore.)
Continue reading →How to Make Mustache.js Templates Play Nice with LaTeX
I'm trying to achieve the holy grail and have a LaTeX cv that gets automatically updated from JSON, like Jsonresume, only with my own custom fields appropriate for someone who does the wild variety of things I do. I'm terrible at LaTeX, but there are plenty of templates floating around, and there's a great new project, Latexresu.me, that appeared on show HN recently—it's awesome, try it—and I just used it to shamelessly steal some stubs to build from.
This is part of an overall website overhaul for me: I'm building an entirely new personal website using Vue that will allow people to do things like generate bibibtex or ris entries for my publications, etc.—basically all kinds of technological overkill for what most people use a static site for. All client-side rendering, even binary files shoved into the webpack bundle as data URIs, all that ridiculousness.
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