Plans for week 47

Dear all, this week we will start with our last topic, a gentle introduction to unsupervised learning. Our focus will be on Boltzmann machines, in particular so-called restricted Boltzmann machines. These have received quite some interest lately, from imaging to the solution of Schroedinger's equation in quantum mechanics, see for example Carleo's article in Science last year, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6325/602

It will also allow us to continue partly with the probabilistic themes discussed last week and bring up what is called MCMC simulations, Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations. So, in addition to discussing the theory behind Boltzmann machines  (with links to the Hopfield and Ising models as well), we will also discuss the Metropolis and Gibbs sampling approach, all highly relevant for Bayesian theory as well.

This will end the topics covered this semester.  We end our discussion of this topic next week. Next week is our last week and the last lecture will be Thursday 29 (no lecture on Friday).   The lab runs as normal both this week and next week.

Best wishes to you all.