A few months ago, I stumbled on to the wonderful book ‘Introduction to Empirical Bayes’ written by David Robinson. I really, really enjoyed the book (I had read the blog posts a long time ago), but this time I decided I wanted to get my hands wet with some Empirical Bayes. In this tutorial, I reproduce a lot of the work in that book. This afforded me the opportunity to gain more experience, but also gave me a nice reason to use a few famous R packages! I was really struck by how intuitive and friendly Empirical Bayes actually was. I’m looking forward to writing a part 2 to this blog post!

I wrote a short tutorial on NMF. Initially, I was skeptical about NMF, but I ended up learning a lot about it, and I discovered that the implementation makes use of an EM approach to efficiently compute the factorization. I had a lot of fun writing this tutorial-hopefully it’s useful to someone out there as well!

Table of Contents

1. SNE
2. t-SNE
3. Drawbacks
4. Code

One week after we visited Ensenada, Heather and I flew to Guanajuato to teach our second development course. There, we met up with Alejandro Sanchez-Alvarado who would give the students the wonderful opportunity to teach the planarian section. I have written about the course experience quite extensively (here)[https://dangeles.github.io/cdc], so I won’t go into full details here. Suffice to say that the experience was wonderful.

In July, Heather and I headed down to Ensenada to teach a Clubes workshop. Originally I wasn’t supposed to go with her, but her co-instructor cancelled at the last minute. Ensenada is quite close to LA—barely a 4 hour drive!

On June 3rd to the 6th, Heather, Manuel, Charlotte and I headed to Yosemite National Park to do some backcountry camping. Yosemite is a beautiful National Park within California. It’s definitely one of my favorite places here in the West Coast.

Heather and I took a short trip to Chiapas that was truly magical. Chiapas is a beautiful state in southern Mexico. Along with Oaxaca, it has the largest Native American population (largely Mayan, who predominantly speak Tzotzil, Tzetzal and Chol). It is one of the weakest Mexican states economically, but it is rich culturally and biologically.

Joshua Tree, 2015