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qqqwwweeerrr

53 karma · joined November 26, 2017

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qqqwwweeerrr··on A tutorial on Principal Components Analysis (2002) [pdf]
Unless you are strictly talking about predictive modeling, I would disagree with this. PCA just tries to represent N-dimensional observations in a k < N dimensional subspace (for a given k) such that it captures the most variation. This does not mean that any obtained component loadings refer to anything real or meaningful.
qqqwwweeerrr··on A low latency guitar effects processor suitable for running on a Raspberry Pi
This is awesome. I'd be really interested to find out if a Raspberry Pi can run an open source amp modeler like NAM (https://github.com/sdatkinson/neural-amp-modeler).
qqqwwweeerrr··on Wikipedia Speedruns
Haha, we used to call it Wikipedia Racing.
qqqwwweeerrr··on What Is Machine Learning Anyway?
I never claimed that everyone wants to claim AI for themselves.

Artificial intelligence is ofcourse a scientific field on it's own right, even before machine learning was a thing. I'm just saying that AI scientists have used concepts from statistics to create an approach to AI called machine learning. I'm not saying that ML is a subset of statistics, mind you, but the statistical underpinnings of it definitely are. ML is not _just_ statistics too.

Moreover, why would statisticians be pissed about the efficacy of a model?

Firstly, many problems/questions that I work on are not concerned with prediction.

Secondly, even if I did, I would love to use DNNs. It's just that I never have a use for it considering I'm only looking at tabular data. Why bother with DNNs when, say, a random forest will do?

qqqwwweeerrr··on What Is Machine Learning Anyway?
The subject matter in the book is more general than focussing on a specific models; the book is about the statistical underpinnings of ML as a whole.
qqqwwweeerrr··on What Is Machine Learning Anyway?
In my opinion (MSc math, PhD in applied statistics, currently postdoc at epidemiology department), the fundamentals are books like The Elements of Statistical Learning: https://hastie.su.domains/Papers/ESLII.pdf

I feel like the term data science is completely useless. Machine learning is an approach to "do AI" through statistics. Specifically, it is a branch of statistics where the sole focus is on prediction, compared to e.g. inference.

qqqwwweeerrr··on Ask HN: How would a programming language look if designed by non-programmer
I hear the complaint that R is a terrible language mainly from professional programmers.

I'm sure it is poorly designed from a computer science perspective, but there is no programming language out there which makes it so easy to run any model under the sun as does R.

qqqwwweeerrr··on Governments 'not on track' to cap temperatures at below 2 degrees: U.N
I feel somewhat embarassed to talk about this, but does anyone else feel a sense of dread and depression when reading news like this? I can't seem to shake it and it's quite strongly affecting my worldview.