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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Probability for a single random variable is straight forward, although it can become complicated when considering two or more variables. With just two variables, we may be interested in the probability of two simultaneous events, called joint probability: the probability of one event given the occurrence of another event called the conditional probability, or just […]
Probability quantifies the uncertainty of the outcomes of a random variable. It is relatively easy to understand and compute the probability for a single variable. Nevertheless, in machine learning, we often have many random variables that interact in often complex and unknown ways. There are specific techniques that can be used to quantify the probability […]
