[Numpy-discussion] performance matrix multiplication vs. matlab

[David Cournapeau]

Jason Rennie wrote:
>
> I hung-out in the machine learning community appx. 1999-2007 and
> thought the Salakhutdinov work was extremely refreshing to see after
> listening to no end of papers applying EM to whatever was the hot
> topic at the time. :)

Isn't it true for any general framework who enjoys some popularity :)

>   I've certainly seen/heard about various fixes to EM, but I haven't
> seen convincing reason(s) to prefer it over proper gradient
> descent/hill climbing algorithms (besides its present-ability and ease
> of implementation).

I think there are cases where gradient methods are not applicable
(latent models where the complete data Y cannot be split into
observations-hidden (O, H) variables), although I am not sure that's a
very common case in machine learning,

cheers,

David