Eigenvector two-condition number for a product of PSD matrices
I’m pushing to submit a preprint on the Nystrom method that has been knocking around for the longest time. I find myself running into problems centering around expressions of the type \(B^{-1}A\),...
View ArticleSharing numpy arrays between processes using multiprocessing and ctypes
Because of its global interpreter lock, Python doesn’t support multithreading. To me, this is a ridiculous limitation that should be gotten rid of post-haste: a programming language is not modern...
View ArticleInstalling Hadoop on Ubuntu (works for Ubuntu 12.04 and Hadoop 2.4.1)
I’m trying to use LDA on a large amount of data. A quick recap: Tried vowpal wabbit … it’s fast, I’ll give it that, but it’s also useless: the output is dubious (what I think are the topics look like...
View Articlea bit on word embeddings
Lately I’ve been working almost exclusively on continuous word representations, with the goal of finding vectorial representations of words which expose semantic and/or syntactic relationships between...
View ArticleJulia, once more
Julia + PyCall + CCall + Gadfly or PyPlot (+ Julia Studio ?) looks delicious. The only feature that absolutely needs to be added is shared memory parallelism (why wasn’t this an initial core feature of...
View ArticleAlgebra: it matters
I’m looking at two different models for learning polynomial functions, and trying to determine if they are equivalent. After a couple days of thinking, I’ve reduced the question to the following: Can...
View ArticleMirror descent is, in a precise sense, a second order algorithm
For one of our projects at eBay, I’ve been attempting to do a Poisson MLE fit on a large enough dataset that Fisher scoring is not feasible. The problem is that the data also has such large variance in...
View ArticleMy podcast masterlist
Here’s an early Christmas gift to you: a list of podcasts I enjoy! For listening while you’re doing all your holiday season travelling. APM: Marketplace KCRW’s Left, Right, and Center Newshour BBC...
View ArticleNystrom vs Random Feature Maps
I haven’t seen a truly convincing study comparing Nystrom approximations to Random Feature Map approximations. On the one hand, a NIPS 2012 paper compared the two and argued that because the bases...
View ArticleWilkinson on a priori error analysis
I’ve been reading a lot of NLA lately (e.g., a recent paper on communication-avoiding RRQR), and necessarily brushing up on some details I paid scant attention to in my NLA courses, like the details of...
View ArticleMarco Polo: I approve, so far
I finally got around to watching Marco Polo. This is perhaps surprising news, as anyone who knows me could guess this would be right up my alley: almost superhuman martial arts (at least in the promo...
View ArticleA quick thought on Supernatural and some other tv shows
Just finished season 9 of Supernatural. You’ve got to give that show credit for being one of the few that *demands* a deus ex machina ending. Anything less, after all this fighting over who’s going to...
View ArticleMy thoughts on the confederate flag
The Confederate flag is literally a symbol of treason. Not only that, but the most treasonous act in the entire history of the United States. Anyone who buys into the ‘States Rights’ explanation for...
View ArticleInstalling Spark with Hadoop 2 using spark-ec2
YARN does not seem to be configured correctly when you use the spark-ec2 script to install a Spark cluster on EC2. Here’s my short workaround for getting YARN to work (with a simple python script at...
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Spark for Linear Algebra: don’t
Here are some pretty pictures of empirical orthogonal functions (principal components in climatology jargon) calculated for the 3D field of ocean temperatures using data collected over 32 years,...
View ArticleMorals, smorals
I just spent several disappointing minutes on Amazon checking out two books by Pinker and Harris recommended on one of the atheist podcasts I follow, both with theses relating to the development of...
View ArticleHow to make the IEEEtran bibliography font smaller
It’s ridiculously over spaced by default, and in addition to correcting this, you may want to reduce the font size to get that extra half page you desperately need to eke out to meet the page limit. To...
View ArticleThey’re coming to get you, Barbara
How does this not have more views (listens, really)?
View ArticleEvery deep learning paper is wrong. Don’t at me. — seen in the bowels of Twitter
Bruh! I’ve been away for five years. Only posting now because I’m productively procrastinating (yes that is a lifehack link, don’t judge me) working on a grant whose writing is going to be like...
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