This is the complete archive of posts from inductio ex machina in reverse chronological order.
ICML and COLT Highlights View Comments
I attended both ICML and COLT this year. This is an overview of what I thought were the most interesting talks.
Generalised Pinsker Inequalities and Surrogate Regret Bounds View Comments
Robert Williamson and I have had two papers accepted at ICML and COLT 2009. They are both about bounds -- one for surrogate losses the other for f-divergences.
Irving “Jack” Good (1916–2009) View Comments
Noting the passing of one of the big names in Bayesian statistics with a discussion some of his work I am personally familiar with.
Priors and the Argument By Design View Comments
Ken Binmore gives a short Bayesian explanation of why the usual Argument By Design for the existence of God only reinforces existing beliefs.
My MLSS 2009 Lecture View Comments
The lectures I gave at MLSS 2009 in Canberra are now up at videolectures.net.
Women in Machine Learning View Comments
Ada Lovelace day aims to “draw attention to women excelling in technology”. Here I highlight a few women in machine learning whose work I admire.
Some Friday afternoon philosophising on the place of machine learning within the larger disciplines of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Amplification.
In machine learning, bias is what allows for generalisation beyond observations. Without it, learning is not possible, regardless of how much data is available and what certain Wired reporters believe.
Probability Estimation: Bayes Risk View Comments
An overview of some properties of conditional, or point-wise, Bayes risks for proper losses.
The Horatio Principle View Comments
This strangely named principle from Binmore's book, “Rational Decisions”, has an unusual take on the axiom of choice and its implications for probability.
Probability Estimation: An Introduction View Comments
Probability estimation is an important class of problem in machine learning. In this, the first of a series of posts, I discuss a natural class of losses for these problems.
The WoBloMo Challenge View Comments
March is the World Blogging Month. I plan to take up the challenge and write a blog post here every other day in March.
Warning! High Dimensions Ahead View Comments
A very counter-intuitive result that highlights the danger of reasoning about higher dimensional space by analogy with lower dimensional ones.
A notice that I've moved this blog to a new domain. Please update your feed readers.
ML and Stats People on Twitter View Comments
Wherein I compile a list of interesting people who use Twitter to discuss machine learning and statistics.
Information, Divergence and Risk for Binary Experiments View Comments
A summary of a recent paper Bob and I posted to arXiv.
Machine Learning Summer School 2009 View Comments
A plug for the 2009 Machine Learning Summer School in Canberra, Australia. I will be giving a presentation there.
Behold! Jensen's Inequality View Comments
Unsatisfied with the very algebraic and formal proofs of Jensen's inequality, I present a diagram that gives a graphical intuition for the result.
Present the results for my latest and greatest attempt at creating an intelligent machine.
Snuck, flied and wedded View Comments
A quick summary of a paper in Nature last year that analyses the rate at which words shift from irregular to regular.
A review of the book "Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way To Be Smart" by Ian Ayers.
A Year of Research Blogging View Comments
Looking back on a year of research blogging about machine learning.
Prediction and the Axiom of Choice View Comments
Some thoughts on Hardin and Taylor's paper "A Peculiar Connection Between the Axiom of Choice and Predicting the Future".
COLT 2008 Highlights View Comments
A quick summary of some of the best talks and papers at COLT 2008 in Helsinki, Finland.
Evaluation Methods for Machine Learning View Comments
Some thoughts on the workshop on evaluation methods that I attended as part of ICML 2008 in Helsinki.
ICML Discussion Site View Comments
A brief note describing the site I set up for ICML 2008.
Visualising 19th Century Reading in Australia View Comments
A description of a visualisation of some 19th century Australian borrowing records from the Australian Common Readers Project.
Constructive and Classical Mathematics View Comments
A simple example involving irrational numbers makes me think that constructive mathematics has something going for it.
Research-Changing Books View Comments
In response to a post by Peter Turney, I list the books I feel shaped my research career.
Visualising ROC and Cost Curve Duality View Comments
Discussion of the point-line duality between Drummond and Holte's cost curves and ROC curves. An applet is provided to help visualise this relationship.
The Earth Is Round (p < 0.05) View Comments
Some sage advice by Jacob Cohen on hypothesis testing and p-values.
Feed Bag: A Simple RSS Archiver View Comments
A brief overview of an RSS archiving tool I whipped up in ruby.
JMLR Discussion On Boosting View Comments
A summary of a sequence of papers in JMLR that discusses an interpretation of boosting.
A Meta-index of Data Sets View Comments
A collection of sites around the web that catalogue a wide variety of data sets that may be useful to machine learning researchers.
Clarity and Mathematics View Comments
A follow-up to John Langford's discussion on how mathematics can be misused in an attempt to improve the chance of publication.
Staying Organised with CiteULike and BibDesk View Comments
An overview of how I use the free Mac application BibDesk along with the online social bibliographic service CiteULike.
A Cute Convexity Result View Comments
A quick post on the use of determinants to define convex functions.
A Crash Course in Convex Analysis View Comments
An overview of convex analysis and the Legendre-Fenchel transform by Hugo Touchette proves very useful.
Principles of Learning Problem Design View Comments
A plug for the workshop talk I'll be giving at NIPS 2007.
The Mathematical Grue View Comments
Doing mathematics sometimes feels like playing a piece of interactive fiction.
A summary of an interesting talk by Justin Bedo which shows that learning can sometimes go very wrong - and how to exploit it.
Introducing Inductio Ex Machina View Comments
A short post describing what I intend for my new research blog.