Regularization is the process of adding information to an estimation problem so as to avoid extreme estimates. Put differently, it safeguards against foolishness. Both Bayesian and frequentist methods can incorporate prior information which leads to regularized estimates, but they do so in different ways. In this blog post, I illustrate ...

“Which variables are important?” is a key question in science and statistics. In this blog post, I focus on linear models and discuss a Bayesian solution to this problem using spike-and-slab priors and the Gibbs sampler, a computational method to sample from a joint distribution using only conditional distributions. Variable ...

Judea Pearl said that much of machine learning is just curve fitting1 — but it is quite impressive how far you can get with that, isn’t it? In this blog post, we will look at the mother of all curve fitting problems: fitting a straight line to a number of ...