Re: GSoC/SoCiS: general maximum entropy algorithm

[Olaf Till]

On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 02:09:15AM +0100, Tomasz Ożański wrote:
> W dniu 26.03.2015 o 23:16, Juan Pablo Carbajal pisze:
> >On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 4:24 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
> ><address@hidden> wrote:
> >>On Thu, 2015-03-26 at 13:44 +0100, Tomasz Ożański wrote:
> >>
> >>>What I would like to know is if you are interested in this sort of
> >>>functionality in Octave?
> >>
> >>It certainly sounds useful, but I wonder if we have someone capable of
> >>mentoring such a project. Perhaps Mike Miller? I don't know if he has
> >>volunteered to mentor this year.
> >>
> >>- Jordi G. H.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >Olaf Till might be also suitable, since min max ent. is used a lot in
> >optimization.
> >
> 
> I would be grateful if any of the proposed mentors would agree to
> supervise my project.

As for me, I'm not familiar with maximum entropy optimization and
I'm not sure that I could get familiar enough with it in the required
short time, so I don't think I could be a mentor.

Trying nevertheless to clarify something -- I can be completely wrong,
but it seems to me that for maximizing entropy the nature of the model
has to be considered, not only the deviations of observed values from
values computed by the model function. If so, how is a _general_ ME
algorithm possible? Even the reference you cite seems to give a
"general" algorithm only for the still special case of image
reconstruction. If I should be right in this, the proposed project
would be no general optimization algorithm.

Still I don't doubt that your project would be useful, without being
able to thoroughly assess it. I hope someone can help you go on with
it.

> Everyone who is a potential mentor ought to be
> a subscriber to this list and basically there aren't any other
> places where I shall look for a supervisor for this project, right?

I'd expect some users of Octave to have expert knowledge on this. The
question is if they would undertake the effort and if they have write
access to Octave or Octave Forge. Maybe there is some community
mentoring or combined mentoring possible.

You could possibly increase your chances by also asking at the help
mailing list.

Olaf

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