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Beyond cosine similarity: a group-theoretic view
Why cosine is standard, how recos follows from the rearrangement inequality, and how both metrics can be understood as orbit-normalized alignments under different symmetry groups. Includes random-vector asymptotics, rotation tests, STS results, kernel diagnostics, and interactive laboratories.
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Implicit maximum likelihood estimation (IMLE)
A careful overview of IMLE: the core formulas, nearest-sample intuition,
algorithm pseudocode, animated synthetic fits, and interactive laboratories for Gaussian,
Gaussian-sum, Cauchy, and failure cases.
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Procedural noise, one construction at a time
A method-by-method review of value, Perlin, simplex, OpenSimplex,
cellular, Gabor, phasor, wave, and wavelet noise, followed by octave
combinations and domain warping. Five interactive laboratories
connect the constructions to their visual and spectral behavior.
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The Fisher information matrix and the Hessian
One matrix wearing three hats: the precision of the best estimate in
statistics, the metric of information geometry, and the curvature
behind second-order optimizers. Built up from the Hessian of a
log-likelihood — the score's two moments, the osculating circle at
the MLE, the Cramér–Rao bound, the KL-divergence Hessian, the
reparameterization tensor law, and the Gauss–Newton decomposition.
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The information theory of matrix completion
Suh's completion capacity recasts matrix completion as a Shannon
problem: how many entries does one observation resolve? A walk
through the theory, an implementation that verifies every closed
form, a GF(2) decoder that exhibits the threshold, and several
verified extensions.
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The many sides of PCA
One method, five derivations: best linear approximation, minimal
reconstruction error, metric MDS, maximum variance with
decorrelation, and the SVD. All reduce to the eigenvectors of the
covariance matrix.
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Maximum likelihood and maximum a posteriori
The two standard methods for estimating model parameters:
definitions, worked examples, how they relate as the sample grows,
and the zero-count problem that motivates smoothing.
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Several views on cross-entropy
From the likelihood of a Bernoulli model, cross-entropy follows as
the negative log-likelihood, and the same quantity reappears as KL
divergence, code length, a proper scoring rule, and mode-covering
KL. Concludes with the comparison to squared error for
classification.