You want to identify the breaker switch for a particular outlet. This problem inspired me to write an article on Medium one day as I was thinking about the electric wiring at home. As you’ll see, there are commonalities between decidely challenging tasks in Machine Learning and the problems you might encounter day to day.… Continue reading Searching for a switch: the Circuit Breaker Panel problem
Author: Alexander Wei
BA, MS Mathematics, Tufts University
Solution Space Techniques for Faster Convergence, an introduction
Many strategies in Machine Learning involve the iterative search of a solution space Ω. We begin with an initial solution ω₀ and update ωₙ to minimize an objective function f(x)
Solve a Substitution Cipher with a Markov chain
There are k! substitution ciphers for an alphabet with k letters—too many for an exhaustive search. With a frequency-based approach adapted to the graph of alphabetic ciphers, we redefine the act of deciphering as a sampling problem suitable for a Metropolis-Hastings random walk. A substitution cipher is thus solvable with a Markov chain. Let’s begin… Continue reading Solve a Substitution Cipher with a Markov chain
Plant Pairs on the Tufts Campus
In Spring of 2019 my Environmental Fieldwork class surveilled the herbaceous plants growing on and around the Tufts campus, recording their identities and locations into a GIS database. For a final project I created a simple Cartesian quadrature algorithm in Python to identify the distinct plant pairs most likely to share the same soil. Whether… Continue reading Plant Pairs on the Tufts Campus