Reminders about multivariate distributions. The multivariate Gaussian distribution: definition, relation to the univariate or scalar Gaussian distribution; effect of linear transformations on the parameters; plotting probability density contours in two dimensions; using eigenvalues and eigenvectors to understand the geometry of multivariate Gaussians; conditional distributions in multivariate Gaussians and linear regression; computational aspects, specifically in R. General methods for estimating parametric distributional models in arbitrary dimensions: moment-matching and maximum likelihood; asymptotics of maximum likelihood; bootstrapping; model comparison by cross-validation and by likelihood ratio tests; goodness of fit by the random projection trick.
Reading: Notes, chapter 14
Posted by crshalizi at March 06, 2012 09:25 | permanent link