1. Differential Equations Refresher

    In my freshman year of college, I took an introductory differential equations class. That was nine years ago. I've forgotten pretty much everything, so I thought I'd review a little, trying to generalize the techniques along the way. I'll use summation notation throughout, and write \(\frac{\partial^n}{\partial x …

    read more
  2. Fun with Likelihood Ratios

    Say you're trying to maximize a likelihood \(p_{\theta}(x)\), but you only have an unnormalized version \(\hat{p_{\theta}}\) for which \(p_{\theta}(x) = \frac{\hat{p_\theta}(x)}{N_\theta}\). How do you pick \(\theta\)? Well, you can rely on the magic of self normalized importance sampling.

    read more