In a recent post I discussed Judea Pearl’s work on causal inference, and in particular on the causal calculus. The post contained a number of “problems for the author” (i.e., me, Michael Nielsen). Judea Pearl has been kind enough to reply with some enlightening comments on four of those problems, as well as contributing a… Continue reading Guest post: Judea Pearl on correlation, causation and the psychology of Simpson’s paradox
Month: February 2012
Addendum on search and support vector machines
In the last post I described how to use support vector machines (SVMs) to combine multiple notions of search relevance. After posting I realized I could greatly simplify my discussion of an important subject in the final section of that post. What I can simplify is this: once you’ve found the SVM parameters, how should… Continue reading Addendum on search and support vector machines
How to combine multiple notions of relevance in search?
In earlier posts I’ve described two different ways we can assess how relevant a given webpage is to a search query: (1) the cosine similarity measure; and (2) the PageRank, which is a query-independent measure of the importance of a page. While it’s good that we have multiple insights into what makes a webpage relevant,… Continue reading How to combine multiple notions of relevance in search?