Notes

In this note we will first talk about briefly some of the main differences of the three main approaches regarding statistics: the bayesian, the frequentist and the statistical learning methods and then present the concept of the estimator, compare how the approaches differ from method to method, we will explain maximum likelihood estimator and the Rao-Cramer Bound. Short introduction to the statistical methods Bayesian 🟩 $$ p(\theta \mid X) = \frac{1}{z}p(X \mid \theta) p(\theta) $$The quantity $P(X \mid \theta)$ could be very complicated if our model is complicated. ...

What is a part of Speech? A part of speech (POS) is a category of words that display similar syntactic behavior, i.e., they play similar roles within the grammatical structure of sentences. It has been known since the Latin era that some categories of words behave similarly (verbs for declination for example). The intuitive take is that knowing a specific part of speech can help understand the meaning of the sentence. ...

Some specific phenomenons in modern systems happen only when we scale into large systems. This note will gather some observations about the most important phenomena we observe at these scales. Tail Latency Phenomenon Tail latency refers to the high-end response time experienced by When scaling our services, using Massive Parallel Processing, and similar technology, it is not rare that a small percentage of requests in a system experience a high-end response time, typically measured at the 95th or 99th percentile. This significant delays that can degrade user experience or system reliability. ...

There is huge literature on planning. We will attack this problem from the view of probabilistic artificial intelligence. In this case we focus on continuous, fully observed with non-linear transitions, an environment often used for robotics. It’s called Model Predictive Control (MPC). \[...\] Moreover, modeling uncertainty in our model of the environment can be extremely useful in deciding where to explore. Learning a model can therefore help to dramatically reduce the sample complexity over model-free techniques. ...

Language Constituents A constituent is a word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure This is because there is a lot of evidence pointing towards an hierarchical organization of human language. Example of constituents Let’s have some examples: John speaks [Spanish] fluently John speaks [Spanish and French] fluently Mary programs the homework [in the ETH computer laboratory] Mary programs the homework [in the laboratory] ...

PAC Learning is one of the most famous theories in learning theory. Learning theory concerns in answering questions like: What is learnable? Somewhat akin to La macchina di Turing for computability theory. How well can you learn something? PAC is a framework that allows to formally answer these questions. Now there is also a bayesian version of PAC in which there is a lot of research. Some definitions Empirical Risk Minimizer and Errors $$ \arg \min_{\hat{c} \in \mathcal{H}} \hat{R}_{n}(\hat{c}) $$ Where the inside is the empirical error. ...

TODO: write the introduction to the note. JSONiq purports as an easy query language that could run everywhere. It attempts to solve common problems in SQL i.e. the lack of support for nested data structures and also the lack of support for JSON data types. A nice thing about JSONiq is that it is functional, which makes its queries quite powerful and flexible. It is also declarative and set-based. These are some commonalities with SQL. ...

This note used the definitions present in Provably Approximately Correct Learning. So, go there when you encounter a word you don’t know. Or search online Rademacher Complexity $$ \mathcal{G} = \left\{ g : (x, y) \to L(h(x), y) : h \in \mathcal{H} \right\} $$ Where $L : \mathcal{Y} \times \mathcal{Y} \to \mathbb{R}$ is a generic loss function. The Rademacher complexity captures the richness of a family of functions by measuring the degree to which a hypothesis set can fit random noise. From (Mohri et al. 2012). ...

These algorithms are good for scaling state spaces, but not actions spaces. The Gradient Idea Recall Temporal difference learning and Q-Learning, two model free policy evaluation techniques explored in Tabular Reinforcement Learning. A simple parametrization 🟩 The idea here is to parametrize the value estimation function so that similar inputs gets similar values akin to Parametric Modeling estimation we have done in the other courses. In this manner, we don’t need to explicitly explore every single state in the state space. ...

Semirings allow us to generalize many many common operations. One of the most powerful usages is the algebraic view of dynamic programming. Definition of a semiring A semiring is a 5-tuple $R = (A, \oplus, \otimes, \bar{0}, \bar{1})$ such that. $(A, \oplus, \bar{0})$ is a commutative monoid $(A, \otimes, \bar{1})$ is a monoid $\otimes$ distributes over $\oplus$. $\bar{0}$ is annihilator for $\otimes$. Monoid Let $K, \oplus$ be a set and a operation, then: ...