| During holiday break the Lamere clan spends lots of time around the kitchen table playing all sorts of games. I make sure that there are plenty of new games under the Christmas year. This year was no exception, with 5 new games for us to while away the hours. We do have some gaming requirements: there are 5 of us who play (sadly, mom is not a game player (apparently I'm too competitive ...sigh)) with an age range of 10 to adult. This year's favorite game by far was 'Citadels'. Citadels is a card game where the goal is to build a city before your opponents do. There are assasins, thieves, warlords and others to watch out for. There's great player interaction, some luck, bluffing and even a bit of role playing. It's a lot of fun (I can tell for sure because the kids dragged out the game even when I wasn't around). Worth checking out during these upcoming indoor winter evenings. |
Wednesday Jan 05, 2005
Many pattern classification problems (including speech recognition and music classification) are solved by using a set of probability distributions called mixture models to represent a single statistical distribution. The EM algorithm is often used to determine the set of distributions given the raw data and the desired number of distributions. S. Akaho has a Java applet that demonstrates how the EM algorithm works. First you draw your data, next you tell it how many probability distributions you want, and then you tell it to go and it will use the EM algorithm to calculate the best sets of distributions.
A good paper on the EM algorithm is A Gentle Tutorial of the EM Algorithm and its Application to Parameter Estimation for Gaussian Mixture and Hidden Markov Models by Jeff A. Bilmes.
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