This is paper draft that is probably more worthy of being a blog post, so I decided to blogize it. Here we go:

Abstract:
It is well-known that Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is not identifiable when more than one source is Gaussian (Comon 1993). However, the question of how identifiable it is is rarely asked. In this paper, we show a ( Read more... )

I think it is well-known that the news media copies stories from each other (presumably with enough changes to not seem too blatant*, but nevertheless the typical lack of citations would suffice to be hung for plagiarism in any academic field). This process can be described as a DAG in which the nodes are stories and the arrows represent copying, ( Read more... )

The great thing about computational linguistics (in particular: text rather than speech) is that it's very easy to come up with research questions that can be answered by doing (often simple) statistics on large corpora, e.g ( Read more... )

According to the sources I've read, Gibbs sampling doesn't really tell you how to sample... it's just divide-and-conquer: you still need to sample each variable from its full conditional ( Read more... )

"Data Mining" and "Machine Learning" are separate communities, which means they go to different conferences, etc. (I didn't meet any data mining people at NIPS). I would like to understand why, since the central idea is the same: do statistics in order to answer queries ( Read more... )

Why do we care about finding MLE, MAP parameter-settings? The focus on the maximum reminds me of the mode, a statistic that one doesn't care about most of the time. (Instead, one tends to focus on the mean and median).

Take the graph below:


( Read more... )