Visualizing MNIST
October 10, 2014 9:21 AM   Subscribe

 
This is quite relevant to my interests; thanks for the post!
posted by GrammarMoses at 9:31 AM on October 10, 2014 [2 favorites]


LaTeX is leaking Computer Modern onto webpages! Call the quarantine team!

thanks for the article!
posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 9:37 AM on October 10, 2014 [1 favorite]


Clicked on the link thinking I was getting a discussion of kerning techniques in typography. Imagine my utter bafflement.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:30 AM on October 10, 2014 [7 favorites]


What great animations. This is the kind of thing that makes me wish for extra lifetimes, because wrapping my head around dimension reduction will probably take that long.
posted by clawsoon at 10:34 AM on October 10, 2014


LaTeX is leaking Computer Modern onto webpages! Call the quarantine team!

\usepackage{mathpazo}

We're safe! But for how long?
posted by Elementary Penguin at 10:35 AM on October 10, 2014 [1 favorite]


There's this idea that because we've got a visual cortex that does a reasonable job at particular transformations of 3d spaces that visualizing higher dimensional spaces as two or three dimensional spaces helps us understand them but that rarely seems to be the case for me. Usually just looking at the numbers is easier.
posted by empath at 10:57 AM on October 10, 2014


How serendipitous, I'm currently taking a stats course on data visualization that includes a lot of dimensionality reduction! I like this explanation; focusing less on the math and more on the concept itself definitely helps me understand it a bit better.

A great example of the usefulness of PCA is this fascinating paper which shows how genes mirror geography among European populations (the first link is behind a paywall but here's the really interesting figure that shows one of the findings).
posted by mr. manager at 11:24 AM on October 10, 2014 [2 favorites]


Every single post in colah's blog is a gem. It's been a great pleasure this year reading them, in that they make the material far more accessible, visual, and geometric, which is what really builds intuition.
posted by Llama-Lime at 11:30 AM on October 10, 2014 [2 favorites]


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