Last Updated on November 1, 2019 Probability calculations are frustratingly unintuitive. Our brains are too eager to take shortcuts and get the wrong answer, instead of thinking through a problem and calculating the probability correctly. To make this issue obvious and aid in developing intuition, it can be useful to work through classical problems from applied probability. These problems, such as the birthday problem, boy or girl problem, and the Monty Hall problem trick us with the incorrect intuitive answer […]

Last Updated on January 10, 2020 Probability for Machine Learning Crash Course.Get on top of the probability used in machine learning in 7 days. Probability is a field of mathematics that is universally agreed to be the bedrock for machine learning. Although probability is a large field with many esoteric theories and findings, the nuts and bolts, tools and notations taken from the field are required for machine learning practitioners. With a solid foundation of what probability is, it is […]

Last Updated on December 4, 2019 Bayes Theorem provides a principled way for calculating a conditional probability. It is a deceptively simple calculation, although it can be used to easily calculate the conditional probability of events where intuition often fails. Although it is a powerful tool in the field of probability, Bayes Theorem is also widely used in the field of machine learning. Including its use in a probability framework for fitting a model to a training dataset, referred to […]

Last Updated on January 10, 2020 Classification is a predictive modeling problem that involves assigning a label to a given input data sample. The problem of classification predictive modeling can be framed as calculating the conditional probability of a class label given a data sample. Bayes Theorem provides a principled way for calculating this conditional probability, although in practice requires an enormous number of samples (very large-sized dataset) and is computationally expensive. Instead, the calculation of Bayes Theorem can be […]

Last Updated on August 22, 2020 In this tutorial, you will discover how to implement the Bayesian Optimization algorithm for complex optimization problems. Global optimization is a challenging problem of finding an input that results in the minimum or maximum cost of a given objective function. Typically, the form of the objective function is complex and intractable to analyze and is often non-convex, nonlinear, high dimension, noisy, and computationally expensive to evaluate. Bayesian Optimization provides a principled technique based on […]

Probabilistic models can define relationships between variables and be used to calculate probabilities. For example, fully conditional models may require an enormous amount of data to cover all possible cases, and probabilities may be intractable to calculate in practice. Simplifying assumptions such as the conditional independence of all random variables can be effective, such as in the case of Naive Bayes, although it is a drastically simplifying step. An alternative is to develop a model that preserves known conditional dependence […]

Last Updated on July 13, 2020 Information theory is a subfield of mathematics concerned with transmitting data across a noisy channel. A cornerstone of information theory is the idea of quantifying how much information there is in a message. More generally, this can be used to quantify the information in an event and a random variable, called entropy, and is calculated using probability. Calculating information and entropy is a useful tool in machine learning and is used as the basis […]

Last Updated on August 28, 2020 Information gain calculates the reduction in entropy or surprise from transforming a dataset in some way. It is commonly used in the construction of decision trees from a training dataset, by evaluating the information gain for each variable, and selecting the variable that maximizes the information gain, which in turn minimizes the entropy and best splits the dataset into groups for effective classification. Information gain can also be used for feature selection, by evaluating […]

Last Updated on November 1, 2019 It is often desirable to quantify the difference between probability distributions for a given random variable. This occurs frequently in machine learning, when we may be interested in calculating the difference between an actual and observed probability distribution. This can be achieved using techniques from information theory, such as the Kullback-Leibler Divergence (KL divergence), or relative entropy, and the Jensen-Shannon Divergence that provides a normalized and symmetrical version of the KL divergence. These scoring […]