Jul 8, 2013 — Bootstrapping — Bootstrapping is another strategy (like cross validation) that we can use for validation or parameter estimation if there is not enough data.  The technique is simple: we basically do random sampling from the original dataset to generate a larger dataset... Read more

Jul 8, 2013 — Standard Errors and Confidence Intervals — I’ve been reading over beautiful notes from STATS315A (thanks to my awesome fellow graduate student Katie!), one of the three statistics courses I wanted to take, but haven’t been able to squeeze in (yet!)   The course notes provide beautifully... Read more

Jul 6, 2013 — Hierarchical Clustering — Hierarchical clustering is a clustering algorithm that aims to create groups of observations or classes based on similar features, x.  It is commonly used for microarray or genetic analysis to find similar patterns of expression, and I’m sure that you’ve seen... Read more

Jul 4, 2013 — Markov Decision Processes — To talk about Markov Decision Processes we venture into Reinforcement Learning, which is a kind of learning that is based on optimization using a reward function.  For example, let’s say that we are training a robot to navigate a space without... Read more