Review of Searching for Collective Behavior in a Large Network of Sensory Neurons
Jan 2014 by Tiago Ramalho
Last time I reviewed the principle of maximum entropy. Today I am looking at a paper which uses it to create a simplified probabilistic representation of neural dynamics. The idea is to measure the spike trains of each neuron individually (in this case there are around 100 neurons from a...
Maximum entropy: a primer and some recent applications
Jan 2014 by Tiago Ramalho
I’ll let Caticha summarize the principle of maximum entropy: Among all possible probability distributions that agree with whatever we know select that particular distribution that reflects maximum ignorance about everything else. Since ignorance is measured by entropy, the method is mathematically implemented by selecting the distribution that maximizes entropy subject...
How to do inverse transformation sampling in scipy and numpy
Dec 2013 by Tiago Ramalho
Let’s say you have some data which follows a certain probability distribution. You can create a histogram and visualize the probability distribution, but now you want to sample from it. How do you go about doing this with python? The short answer: import numpy as np import scipy.interpolate as interpolate...
A lovely new minesweeper on android I made
Dec 2013 by Tiago Ramalho
Today I am finally releasing my little minesweeper for android! I’ve been working on this as a hobby for the past few weekends, and now it is finally smooth enough to let other people see it! The problem with most minesweeper applications in the market is that they are either...
Gamma distribution approximation to the negative binomial distribution
Dec 2013 by Tiago Ramalho
In a recent data analysis project I was fitting a negative binomial distribution to some data when I realized that the gamma distribution was an equally good fit. And with equally good I mean the MLE fits were numerically indistinguishable. This intrigued me. In the internet I could find only...