Algorithms Group, HMM meets EM

Alisa reviews HMM, EM, and shows us how to combine them.

The EM version treats the transition probabilities (exchanging coins) and emission probabilities (chance of heads/tails under each coin) as unknowns.  Make a guess, calculate the blue line from before.  This can be used to calculate a new guess that will hill climb to the locally optimum solution (EM).

New guess for the transition probability is:

\[ A_{lk} = \frac{f_i b_i a_{lk} e_k(x_{i+1}) }{P(x)} \]

New guess for the emission probability is just:

\[ \frac{\sum f_i b_i}{P(x)}\]

(example code coming)

Future Topics

  • Sweave/literate programming, Github – Carl

  • Large Scale spatial analysis – Yaniv

  • Bayesian CP analysis – Alisa

  • Dirchelet process

  • machine learning: GA/SVM/NN – Dave

  • Optimal Control/Lagrangian

  • EC2 / HPC

  • debug/profile/unit tests/code optimization