There are only two more weeks in the course! This week will extend what you learned from the Expected Value by performing an optimization and sensitivity analysis.

Introducing a simple and intuitive API for UCI machine learning portal, where users can easily look up a data set description, search for a particular data set they are interested, and even download datasets categorized by size or machine learning task.

Reading visualization research papers can often feel like a slog. As a necessity, there’s usually a lot of jargon, references to William Cleveland and Robert McGill, and sometimes perception studies that lack a bit of rigor. So for practitioners or people generally interested in data communication, worthwhile research falls into a “read later” folder never to be seen again.

Improving Neural Networks – Hyperparameter Tuning, Regularization, and More

This note is about attempting to remove the bias brought in by using sample standard deviation estimates to estimate an unknown true standard deviation of a population. We establish there is a bias, concentrate on why it is not important to remove it for reasonable sized samples, and (despite that) give a very complete bias management solution.

With the vast quantities of news content available online about every topic, it can be a challenge to source content about what you are interested in without getting a lot of noise as well.

This note is about attempting to remove the bias brought in by using sample standard deviation estimates to estimate an unknown true standard deviation of a population. We establish there is a bias, concentrate on why it is not important to remove it for reasonable sized samples, and (despite that) give a very complete bias management solution.

APES Assisted by neural networks, reinforcement learning agents have been able to solve increasingly complex tasks over the last years. The simulation environment in which the agents interact is an essential component in any reinforcement learning problem. The environment simulates the dynamics of the agents’ world and hence provides feedback to their actions in terms of state observations and external rewards. To ease the design and simulation of such environments this work introduces $\texttt{APES}$, a highly customizable and open source package in Python to create 2D grid-world environments for reinforcement learning problems. $\texttt{APES}$ equips agents with algorithms to simulate any field of vision, it allows the creation and positioning of items and rewards according to user-defined rules, and supports the interaction of multiple agents. …

PCNet A deep neural network (DNN) based power control method is proposed, which aims at solving the non-convex optimization problem of maximizing the sum rate of a multi-user interference channel. Towards this end, we first present PCNet, which is a multi-layer fully connected neural network that is specifically designed for the power control problem. PCNet takes the channel coefficients as input and outputs the transmit power of all users. A key challenge in training a DNN for the power control problem is the lack of ground truth, i.e., the optimal power allocation is unknown. To address this issue, PCNet leverages the unsupervised learning strategy and directly maximizes the sum rate in the training phase. Observing that a single PCNet does not globally outperform the existing solutions, we further propose ePCNet, a network ensemble with multiple PCNets trained independently. Simulation results show that for the standard symmetric multi-user Gaussian interference channel, ePCNet can outperform all state-of-the-art power control methods by 1.2%-4.6% under a variety of system configurations. Furthermore, the performance improvement of ePCNet comes with a reduced computational complexity. …