(no subject)

[gusl]

Good stuff from Cosma Shalizi. I want to be like him: I want to work on philosophical questions (or simply highly conceptual questions) on a technical/mathematical level.

Machine Learning, Statistical Inference and Induction

Complexity, Entropy and the Physics of gzip, where he criticizes physicists using this approach. What I don't understand is when physicists would want to calculate the entropy of a source.

and his review of "Jorma Rissanen - Stochastic Complexity in Statistical Inquiry"

The Backwards Arrow of Time of the Coherently Bayesian Statistical Mechanic

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As I recently found out, Herbert Simon is also someone I really look up to. Besides pioneering cognitive science, which aims for a coherent computational theory of cognition, and in particular high-level "chunking" and "rules of the mind", he studied human decision-making and wrote a book called "Administrative Behavior", which examines rationality and decision-making... the sort of question I want to give consult about.

Comments

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Actually, after browsing it more carefully, it makes no sense to me either. I thought he would be talking about the use of KC in physics.

Have the people in your institute made a compressor out of a universal learning machine?

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

No, our universal machines aren't really buildable. Though I think Jan might be trying to build something based on these ideas for some special case.

At the moment I've just tried to use compression for a few basic problems like text categorization. I normally use bzip2 as it's better than gzip, though I have tried PPM compressors as well. My results so far seem to be that the approach works reasonably well, but perhaps not well enough to replace existing methods.