The problem One of my tasks as head of our final undergraduate year on our Psychology MA/BSc programme is to allocate students to elective modules. We have in the order of 80-100 undergraduates in our final year, and ignoring their undergraduate dissertation, most of them must take 3 modules. There are exceptions however for joint …
Continue reading “Optimal allocation of students to modules”
So far we’ve had a look at rejection sampling and importance sampling. Here we take a quick look at slice sampling, although rather than implementing it ourselves, we will use the built in Matlab slicesample function. Using our parameter estimation example, we will use slice sampling to estimate the mean and sigma of some samples from …
I’ve been using MCMC, but I’ve wanted to flesh out my knowledge and explore the space of sampling approaches a little more. One very simple, yet inefficient method, is rejection sampling. Here is a little Matlab example I put together after seeing how easy it was. This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted …
I am happy to announce my 3rd paper of the year, accepted for publication in Behavior Research Methods. Following my initial foray into writing review papers (2 earlier this year), this is my first methods paper, and also my first contribution to higher-level decision making.
I’ve just released a small bit of Matlab code on GitHub which helps automate the job of plotting posterior predictive distributions. If you are inferring posterior distributions of parameters of a 1D function (e.g. y=mx+c) then this code will plot the posterior predictive distribution for you. This should be handy for you to eyeball how well a model …
Continue reading “Plotting posterior predictive distributions”
If you’ve decided to join the increasing number of people using MCMC methods to conduct Bayesian inference, then one important decision is which software to use. This decision will be influenced by your programming language of choice, see Figure below. If you use Matlab, then really your best choice at the moment is JAGS. You use it …
In the last few months I’ve decided to break off a ~15 year relationship with Matlab. We’ve been through many important times together and it’s not been an easy decision to make, but I think this is the best for both of us. Matlab saw me through my DPhil, helping me code up neural network …
[UPDATE: February 2014] The files and instructions are now hosted on GitHub. Energy efficient receptive field code by Benjamin Vincent is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. This minimal set of MATLAB functions will set up a simple neural network to learn receptive fields. These receptive fields minimise an energy function which involves a) …
