Some LaTeX Gems - Part 1: TikZ, Loops and more

This logo means that the blog post is about something I have found interesting, but does not apply directly to the exact purpose of this blog.

Note: These commands have been tested in pdflatex. I am not sure if they work in other distributions.

Over the past couple of months, I have been assisting with editing some papers and also doing some projects in LaTeX. Seeing other peoples’ code has taught me some interesting things. Here are a few of them.

Arrays, Lists, and Loops

Indeed, it is possible to write loops in LaTeX, with a few limitations. I have used this in some of the following ways

creating a perfectly aligned bubble answer sheet for scoring by a desktop scanner.
constructing midterms using a different dataset (form) for each student.
creating sheets of business cards for our consulting center / mail merge.

Some other ways arrays and loops can be used with some clever programming:

creating multiple forms of an exam using item from different files.
reports such as rosters, invoices, pre-printed forms, etc.

Arrays. To create an array in LaTeX, you will need the arrayjob package that can be downloaded from here. Then, to create the array we use the command \newarray\ArrayName where ArrayName is the name of the [...]

April 23rd, 2010 | Category: LaTeX | 3 comments

Anecdotal Evidence that Facebook Stores all Clicks?

This is not really news. A few months ago, news broke that Facebook recorded each user’s clicks and profile views in a database. Of course, I am not at all surprised. I would be more surprised if they didn’t store every single click.

By now, most people have some sense as to how Facebook’s recommendation system works. It typically performs what one of my professors called “completing the triangle.” If users and are friends, and users and are friends, Facebook may hypothesize that and should also be friends. Of course, Facebook’s algorithm is not that naive. Consider a slightly more realistic example in the graph below. I must provide a picture, otherwise I will end up using “recursive language” (i.e. “friends of a friend of a friend that’s friends with…”). The red lines represent existing friendships. This graph consists of two triangles, one containing one man and the two women, and another containing one woman and the two men. Facebook would most likely conclude that the two people with spiky hair should be friends, denoted by the green dashed line.

On Facebook, I am a member of several different network clusters, as most people are. Some [...]

April 11th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | One comment

Opening Statements on Markov Chain Monte Carlo

This quarter I am TAing UCLA’s Statistics 102C. Introduction to Monte Carlo Methods for Professor Qing Zhou. This course did not exist when I was an undergraduate, and I think it is pretty rare to teach Monte Carlo (minus the bootstrap if you count that) or MCMC to undergrads. I am excited about this class because to me, MCMC turns Statistics on its head. It felt like a totally different paradigm compared to the regression and data analysis paradigm that I was used to at the time. It also exposes students to the connection between Statistics/MCMC and other fields such as Computer Science, Genetics/Biology, etc.

I usually do not have much to talk about during week 1, especially if my class is the second day of the quarter. Today was an exception because I wanted to excite the class about this topic.

Some examples I discussed:

the general recipe for Monte Carlo methods
the bootstrap as an example of resampling, and R loops
computing and mention of Buffon’s Needle
scheduling/timetabling and occupancy/matching problems using stochastic search (simulated annealing, Tabu search etc.)
mention of genetic algorithms and swarm intelligence
PageRank as a Markov process
drawing a random sample of web pages using Random Walk Metropolis-Hastings
short inventory of fields [...]

April 1st, 2010 | Category: Algorithms, Data Mining, Machine Learning, R, Statistics and Statistical Computing, Web Mining | 2 comments