explanation

The legend of Bigfoot has existed for generations. All around the world, tales of a hairy, humanoid creature lurking in the woods have sprouted, some even offering video evidence. However, scientists believe Bigfoot’s existence could have a very simple explanation. According to researchers, we can probably attribute these mysterious sightings to rare occasions of bears walking on their hind legs. American black bears usually tend to walk on all four legs. However, they will stand on their hind legs to get a…

Rendering of Jupiter Trojan Swarm. Credit: NASA/JPL-CaltechA rapidly migrating Jupiter mechanism offers crucial new insights into the early evolution of the Solar System.An international team of scientists led by Jian Li from Nanjing University, including NYUAD researcher Nikolaos Georgakarakos and others from the US, Japan, and China, has developed new insights that could explain the numerical asymmetry of the <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain What causes two people from opposing political parties to have strongly divergent interpretations of the same word, image or event? Take the word "freedom," for example, or a picture of the American flag, or even the 2020 U.S. presidential election. A person who identifies politically as liberal…

How many times do we have to see Twitter remove features before it finally decides what it wants to be?Photo: Dawid S Swierczek (Shutterstock)Hope you got the chance to test out Twitter’s CoTweet feature, as the company suddenly dropped the ability for Twitter users to co-author tweets Tuesday. You won’t find that news on any one of Twitter’s main pages or accounts. The only way you would know Twitter was getting rid of the feature was if you happened to browse Twitter’s Help Center page on Monday. The company wrote that…

A burly figure emerges from the shadows of a forest, only to lumber off into the cover of trees once again.It's a scene that's been caught from the corner of a thousand human eyes, yet no one is any closer to looking a Bigfoot or a Sasquatch square in the face. If someone were to meet the mythical creature's gaze, they might be surprised by what they find looking back at them.A data scientist by the name of Floe Foxon has shown that most Bigfoot sightings in the United States and Canada were probably black bears,…

Introduction and explanation of the NAF algorithm, widely used in continuous control tasksPhoto by Sufyan on UnsplashPrevious articles in this series have introduced and explained two Reinforcement Learning algorithms that have been widely used since their inception: Q-Learning and DQN.Q-Learning stores the Q-Values in an action-state matrix, such that to obtain the action a with the largest Q-Value in state s, the largest element of the Q-Value matrix for row s must be found, which makes its application to continuous…

Understanding the roots of inverse propensity weighting through a simple example.Photo by Diego PH on UnsplashOne of the well-established methods for causal inference is based on the Inverse Propensity Weighting (IPW). In this post we will use a simple example to build an intuition for IPW. Specifically, we will see how IPW is derived from a simple weighted average in order to account for varying treatment assignment rates in causal evaluation.Let’s consider the simple example where we want to estimate the average effect…

How K-Means can be used to significantly reduce the file size of an image.In this guide, I describe and implement the k-means algorithm from scratch and apply it to image compression. I use different visualizations to help the reader develop a stronger understanding of the k-means algorithm and how it can be used for image compression. I also discuss various advantages and limitations of this approach towards the end.All images unless otherwise noted are by the author, available here.Using K-means to compress the original…

Netflix is canceling original shows left and right lately, even when they seem to find an audience. This comes as the company struggles to gain new customers around the world. The company has already introduced an ad-supported tier, and it’s about to stop users from sharing passwords with anyone outside their households. Given all these issues, cutting costs is clearly a major priority for Netflix, even when it comes to brand-new shows that have only aired their first seasons. A few years ago, Netflix would…

Learn the behavior of the DQN algorithm step by step, as well as its improvements compared to previous Reinforcement Learning algorithmsPhoto by Андрей Сизов on UnsplashDeep Q-Networks, first reported by Mnih et al. in 2013 in the paper , is one of the best-known Reinforcement Learning algorithms to date, due to the ability it has shown since its publication to achieve higher-than-human performance in countless Atari games, as shown in Figure 1.Figure 1. Plot of median human-normalized score over 57 Atari games for each…