Aug 15, 2013 — What is Standard Error? — Let’s say that I have a huge file cabinet filled with pasta (choose your favorite kind from “the Plethora of Pasta Permutations”) and I want to know the volume of each piece (let’s say there is a contest to guess... Read more

Aug 15, 2013 — Visual: How Sampling can Approximate a True Relationship — We know from central limit theorem and the law of large numbers that when we take a bunch of random samples from some unknown distribution, and then look at the distribution of sample means, as our number of samples goes... Read more

Aug 15, 2013 — Visual: Plotting Model Complexity vs. Error — I recently purchased the new Elements of Statistical Learning (with Applications in R) by Witten, Hastie, Tibshirani, and James, and am completely taken with the beautiful plots in this book.  Of course I won’t redistribute my copy, and I’m not... Read more

Aug 14, 2013 — Optimization Functions — I wanted to compile a nice list of (general) optimization functions for different algorithms, mostly so I don’t need to look them up one by one.  If an optimization method isn’t appropriate, I’ll summarize how you make a classification.  I... Read more