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Gibbs sampling made easy – JAGS, RKWard, CODA
I’ve used OpenBUGS for Gibbs sampling in the past, and while it’s a powerful piece of software, I hate OpenBUGS’ GUI, especially since it runs only on Windows. JAGS is an alternative Gibbs sampling program that uses an OpenBUGS-like syntax and runs on the command line. You can call JAGS in R through the rjags
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A Gaussian integral identity
This integral pops up all the time in Bayesian data analysis: I got tired of rederiving the solution, so I am posting it here for easy reference: Where d is the dimensionality of , is the matrix determinant and:
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Speeding up numeric code: McFor and Theano
Matlab has high-level language constructs that make it easy to express linear algebra computations in a terse, intuitive syntax. Its flexibility as a scripting language, however, means that it has underwhelming performance in some circumstances. While Matlab’s just-in-time (JIT) compiler helps quite a bit, research has shown that there is much space for performance improvements.
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Hexagonal orientation maps in V1
Interesting paper from Se-Bum Paik and Dario Ringach in this month’s issue of Nature Neuroscience on the origins of the orientation map in V1. Dr. Ringach has been developing a model of V1 orientation selectivity for a number of years now, the statistical connectivity hypothesis, based on the idea that the retinotopic map in V1
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The Zeo sleep coach: EEG-based hypnograms for the masses
You can’t do math if you can barely keep your eyes opened. While improving sleep quality can increase your science productivity, this is easier said than done. The famous number theorist Erdös once said that a mathematician is a machine that turns coffee into theorems, and it is well known that he abused amphetamines himself;
xcorr: AI & neuro 