6.437 Inference and Information
Spring 2018
Reverend Thomas Bayes, Sir Ronald Fisher, and Claude
Shannon
Instructors: Polina Golland, Gregory W Wornell
TAs: Sitan Chen, Justin Dove, Dogyoon Song, Karren Dai Yang
Lecture:
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 9:30-11am (32-155)
Recitation: Fridays, 1-2pm or 2-3pm (4-231)
TA Office Hours: Mondays, 4-6pm and Thursdays, 4-5pm (36-156)
Greg's and Polina's Office Hours: By appointment
Information:
Introduction to principles of Bayesian and non-Bayesian statistical inference. Hypothesis testing and parameter estimation, sufficient statistics; exponential families. EM algorithm. Log-loss inference criterion, entropy and model capacity. Kullback-Leibler divergence and information geometry. Asymptotic analysis and large deviations theory. Model order estimation; nonparametric statistics. Computational issues and approximation techniques; Monte Carlo methods. Selected special topics including universal inference and learning, and universal features and neural networks.
ACCESS TO THE WEBSITE is limited to the students enrolled in the course as LISTENERS or FOR CREDIT. Please talk to us in class about registering and getting access to the web site. You can download the general information handout by clicking on the "General Info" tab on the left, even if you are not enrolled in the course.
Announcements
Project Grades
Project grades with performance breakdowns have been emailed to each student's "@mit.edu" email address. These emails are automated, so please check your spam folder if you don't see it. If you haven't received the email within the next 24 hours, you can email me to inquire about your project grade.Announced on 22 May 2018 4:06 p.m. by Justin Dove
Office Hours
We will hold office hours today 4-5pm and Monday 4-6pm in 36-156 as usual. Good luck studying for the final!Announced on 17 May 2018 3:26 p.m. by Justin Dove
Final Quiz Reminder
Dear 6.437'ers--As a reminder, our final quiz is next week: Wednesday, May 23, 9am-noon in Johnson Athletic Center on the track level. The quiz will be closed book, but you may bring four 8.5x11" sheets of notes (both sides) to the quiz. The material covered will be through the final lecture this Thursday, Problem Set 9, and last Friday's final recitation.
There will be additional TA office hours in advance of the quiz, the details of which the TAs will announce.
See you Thursday for our final lecture, which will feature, among other things, highlights from the submitted projects, as part of our subject wrap-up.
Greg
PS. I think we have projects submitted from all currently registered students, but if you are registered but have not turned in a project, please get in touch with us as soon as possible, since completing the project is a subject requirement.
Announced on 15 May 2018 2:56 p.m. by Gregory W Wornell
Project Part II Submission
Please make sure your code runs on Athena without error under the provided test script before submitting. Some people have run into compatibility issues with the version of numpy on Athena, and compatibility issues with python or matlab are quite possible too.If your code can't run under the test script, then our grading script is probably going to choke on it too. I'll stick around a little after recitation to help anyone with last minute issues of this kind.
Announced on 11 May 2018 12:36 p.m. by Justin Dove
CHANGE OF ROOM: Midterm tonight is in Walker Memorial
The midterm tonight is in Walker Memorial, 7-10pm. It is a bigger room with better table arrangements, and the whole class will be able to be in one room and benefit from more TAs in the case of questions.Best of luck on the midterm!
Announced on 21 March 2018 11:38 a.m. by Polina Golland
