Category Archives: SMLBOOK

LM101-086: Ch8: How to Learn the Probability of Infinitely Many Outcomes

Episode Summary: This 86th episode of Learning Machines 101 discusses the problem of assigning probabilities to a possibly infinite set of outcomes in a space-time continuum which characterizes our physical world. Such a set is called an “environmental event”. The machine learning algorithm uses information about the frequency of environmental events to support learning. If we want to… Read More »

LM101-085: Ch7: How to Guarantee your Batch Learning Algorithm Converges

This 85th episode of Learning Machines 101 discusses formal convergence guarantees for a broad class of machine learning algorithms designed to minimize smooth non-convex objective functions using batch learning methods. In particular, a broad class of unsupervised, supervised, and reinforcement machine learning algorithms which iteratively update their parameter vector by adding a perturbation based upon all of the training data. This process is repeated, making a perturbation of the parameter vector based upon all of the training data until a parameter vector is generated which exhibits improved predictive performance. The magnitude of the perturbation at each learning iteration is called the “stepsize” or “learning rate” and the identity of the perturbation vector is called the “search direction”. Simple mathematical formulas are presented based upon research from the late 1960s by Philip Wolfe and G. Zoutendijk that ensure convergence of the generated sequence of parameter vectors. These formulas may be used as the basis for the design of artificially intelligent smart automatic learning rate selection algorithms. The material in this podcast is designed to provide an overview of Chapter 7 of my new book “Statistical Machine Learning” and is based upon material originally presented in Episode 68 of Learning Machines 101!

LM101-084: Ch6: How to Analyze the Behavior of Smart Dynamical Systems

Episode Summary: In this episode of Learning Machines 101, we review Chapter 6 of my book “Statistical Machine Learning” which introduces methods for analyzing the behavior of machine inference algorithms and machine learning algorithms as dynamical systems. We show that when dynamical systems can be viewed as special types of optimization algorithms, the behavior of those systems even… Read More »

LM101-083: Ch5: How to Use Calculus to Design Learning Machines

Episode Summary: This particular podcast covers the material from Chapter 5 of my new book “Statistical Machine Learning: A unified framework” which is now available! The book chapter shows how matrix calculus is very useful for the analysis and design of both linear and nonlinear learning machines with lots of examples. Show Notes: Hello everyone! Welcome to the… Read More »

LM101-082: Ch4: How to Analyze and Design Linear Machines

Episode Summary: This particular podcast covers the material in Chapter 4 of my new book “Statistical Machine Learning: A unified framework” which is now available! Many important and widely used machine learning algorithms may be interpreted as linear machines and this chapter shows how to use linear algebra to analyze and design such machines. In addition, these same… Read More »

LM101-081: Ch3: How to Define Machine Learning (or at Least Try)

A large class of complex machine learning algorithms can be represented as dynamical systems which are minimizing an objective function with respect to a preference relation.

LM101-080: Ch2: How to Represent Knowledge using Set Theory

Episode Summary: This particular podcast covers the material in Chapter 2 of my new book “Statistical Machine Learning: A unified framework” with expected publication date May 2020. In this episode we discuss Chapter 2 of my new book, which discusses how to represent knowledge using set theory notation. Chapter 2 is titled “Set Theory for Concept Modeling”. Show… Read More »

LM101-079: Ch1: How to View Learning as Risk Minimization

Episode Summary: This particular podcast covers the material in Chapter 1 of my new (unpublished) book “Statistical Machine Learning: A unified framework”. In this episode we discuss Chapter 1 of my new book, which shows how supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning algorithms can be viewed as special cases of a general empirical risk minimization framework. This is useful… Read More »

LM101-078: Ch0: How to Become a Machine Learning Expert

This particular podcast is the initial episode in a new special series of episodes designed to provide commentary on a new book that I am in the process of writing. In this episode we discuss books, software, courses, and podcasts designed to help you become a machine learning expert!