Mailund on the Internet

Today's lecture in my machine learning class was on artificial neural networks, slides below:

The approach to introduce them was to consider them just a way of automatically learning basis functions in a linear regression setup.

While this isn't really the full story, it is motivated by the project they have just handed in, where they needed to predict values based on trained linear regression models.

Training linear models is rather straightforward, but guessing good feature functions (transformation of the predictor variables) is tricky, and for the data I gave them in the project, some of the models were downright evil.

This should motivate having models where you don't need to be able to guess the features -- or at least where it isn't as essential -- and that is how I present neural networks.

I think I'll give my students another project now, that is just re-doing the first project but using neural networks instead of linear regression...

At Genomicron, Ryan Gregory refuses to participate in ResearchBlogging. Why? Because their slogan is Discussing and Creating Peer-reviewed Research. Discussing is fine, but we are not creating peer-reviewed research by blogging about it.

I hadn't noticed this slogan -- it is only on the large icon and I only use the small icons when I use it in posts about published research -- but it is not something I worry too much about. I like to read discussions about published papers in blogs, but I am not kidding myself that much research is being created there.

I'll still use the icon to highlight when I am discussing a paper -- and not some more general issue.

Another, older complaint, is that blogging on peer-reviewed research it can be confused for the actual peer-review process:

As a scientist, I take the peer review system very seriously (its several problems notwithstanding) and I do not wish to see blogs perceived as even an approximation of that system. That said, blogs are a useful way to discuss research, and I am happy to see this new development in science communication.

Again, I love reading about paper discussions -- it feels like a global journal club -- but I agree that the actual peer-review process has very little to do with blog discussions of papers!