Blog
These posts have evolved from my digital garden1 into a bit longer form. Their main role is to educate myself and they may be incomplete, written from a very subjective point of view, or contain errors. I’d be grateful for feedback on how to improve them!
| Date | Title | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Oct 29, 2024 | A very subjective single-cell transcriptomics reading list | I have barely done any research on single cells, but sometimes people ask me about literature recommendations. Here it is. |
| Oct 28, 2024 | A probabilistic proof of the Stirling’s formula | A short note on a beautiful new preprint. |
| Sep 22, 2024 | How expressive are Bernoulli mixture models? | Namely, a post on establishing bounds. |
| Sep 1, 2024 | Non-reversible parallel tempering | Markov chain got stuck in a single mode? Parallel tempering comes to help. |
| Aug 16, 2024 | Estimating the mean vector | Let’s estimate the mean vector from multivariate normal data. |
| Jul 15, 2024 | How many distinct Ising models are over there? | Essentially one. But some care is needed to count them properly. |
| Jul 11, 2024 | Learning models with discrete Fisher divergence | High-dimensional discrete models suffer from the issue with intractable normalising constants. A recent manuscript introducing discrete Fisher divergence helps to resolve this issue. |
| Jun 10, 2024 | Adjoint group homomorphisms | Adjoint functors are a core topic in category theory. As group homomorphisms are essentially functors, when do they form an adjunction? |
| May 13, 2024 | Invariance of the mutual information and the profile | We revisit the proof of mutual information invariance and generalize it to the pointwise mutual information profile. |
| Apr 14, 2024 | On mixtures and admixtures | A quick look at the differences between mixture and admixture models. |
| Apr 2, 2024 | Proofs that pi and e are irrational | Two short and well-known proofs of irrationality. |
| Mar 26, 2024 | Softmax, mixtures and exponential families | Let’s take a look at a sentence from the variational classification paper. |
| Feb 19, 2024 | Beta-Bernoulli distribution | Bernoulli, binomial, beta-binomial… Why don’t we talk about the beta-Bernoulli distribution? |
| Feb 12, 2024 | Starting (on finite domains) with Gaussian processes | Gaussian processes are wonderful. Let’s take a look at the machinery behind them in the simplest case: when they are just a multivariate normal distribution. |
| Feb 10, 2024 | Setting up a new project repository | From time to time I receive a question on setting up a new project repository. I’m not really qualified to answer this question, but I’ll do my best. |
| Feb 4, 2024 | Regression to the mean and biased predictions | We take a closer look at an example where adding some bias can help with making predictions. |
| Feb 2, 2024 | From \(t\)-test to “This is what ‘power=0.06’ looks like” | We take a close look at the derivation of the \(t\)-test and reproduce plots used by Andrew Gelman to show implications of low-powered studies. |
| Jan 27, 2024 | Strict linear independence of measures | We look at the concept of strict linear independce of measures and see how it is related to identifiability of mixture models. |
| Jan 26, 2024 | From kernel regression to the transformer | We’ll go from kernel regression to attention. |
| Jan 21, 2024 | Expectation-maximization and Gibbs sampling in quantification | Let’s analyse how to estimate how many cats and dogs can be found in an unlabeled data set. |
| Jan 19, 2024 | An almost binomial Markov chain | Everybody knows how to toss a coin. This time we’ll toss it a few times. |
| Nov 20, 2023 | The mutual information saga | Behind the scenes of our mutual information research. |
| Oct 14, 2023 | Getting started with Bayesian statistics | From time to time I receive a question from students and collaborators how to get started with Bayesian statistics. So here it comes: the list of my favourite resources! |
| Sep 28, 2023 | The no free lunch theorem for scientific research | A perfect paper should have novel methodology, solve an important problem, and be correct. In practice, the no free lunch theorem says that at most two of these are possible. |
| Aug 31, 2023 | Two distributions on a triangle | Sometimes if you misunderstand something, you can have two interesting distributions, rather than only one. |
| Aug 1, 2023 | Histograms or kernel density estimators? | We take a look at summarizing samples with histograms and kernel density estimators. |
| Jul 26, 2023 | Matrix determinant from the exterior algebra viewpoint | We look at the ordinary matrix determinant from the exterior algebra point of view. |
| Jul 11, 2023 | The Dirichlet process | In an informal fashion we introduce several constructions of the Dirichlet process. |
| Jul 9, 2023 | Understanding board games with Monte Carlo simulations | We look at several simple situations occurring in board games and analyse them with Monte Carlo simulations. |
| Jul 8, 2023 | Student mentorship: expectations document | I learned from one of my mentors that it’s important to discuss the mutual expectations of the mentorship, be it a PhD thesis or a lab rotation. This document serves as a template, which we can further discuss and adjust. |
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