Monthly Archives: November 2008

Below I asked the question of why an approximation which is more accurate seems to be performing worse than one which is more haphazard.  The two methods differ in two principal ways: The approximate gradient computed during the E-step.   … Continue reading →

It is a good idea to always make sure to make experiments exactly reproducible.  Sometimes in the heat of a paper deadline, a bunch of experiments are run with different parameter settings and what not and a few months down … Continue reading →

The central challenge of variational methods is usually computing expectations of log probabilities.  In the case of the RTM, this is where . The first term is linear and so is easy enough, the second is problematic though.  One approach … Continue reading →