Blog
Writing about mathematics, machine learning, and the ideas behind them.
NMF on Immune Cells: What Chemo-Immunotherapy Does to Your T-Cell Army
We applied Non-negative Matrix Factorization to single-cell immune data from a lung cancer patient. The algorithm independently rediscovered when treatment-responsive T cells peak.
The Bias-Variance Tradeoff: It Holds Until It Doesn't
The textbook says more training means more overfitting — until a researcher went on vacation and came back to find the opposite was true.
Gradient Descent: The Blind Man Who Finds the Valley
The algorithm behind all of deep learning is a blind man walking downhill. The strange part is why he almost never gets stuck.
The Strange Simplicity of Machine Learning
Most of machine learning comes down to one elegant idea from 1958 — finding a line between points.
Bayesian Probability: Is Statistics Even Real?
Bayes' theorem answers the questions we actually care about. It also implies something uncomfortable — that probability is just a measure of our ignorance.