Daniel Herrera-Esposito

Daniel Herrera-Esposito

Computational Neuroscientist. Interested in the brain, math, computers, and sometimes epidemiology

Blog posts

2024

Covariance shrinkage for begginers with Python implementation

17 minute read

Published:

Covariance matrices are one of the most important objects in statistics and machine learning, essential to many algorithms. But estimating covariance matrices can be difficult, especially in high-dimensional settings. In this post we introduce covariance shrinkage, a technique to improve covariance matrix estimation. We also provide a PyTorch implementation of a popular shrinkage technique, the Oracle Approximating Shrinkage (OAS) estimator.

GitHub releases to keep your old projects from breaking

3 minute read

Published:

If you are a scientist who uses code in your research, you might have experienced the following scenario. You wrote some code, let’s say in directory my_code/, or GitHub repository https://github.com/my_user/my_code. You use this code in a certain project and analyses are currently working. Then, you have the idea of modifying my_code, for example, to add a new feature required by a new project. However, the new modified code might (and probably will) break the old project.

Is the world as we see it?

36 minute read

Published:

Author translation of the chapter “Es el mundo como lo vemos?” (link to pdf in Spanish) for the book “Hitos y Mitos del Cerebro”, edited for the homonymous first year course at Universidad de la República, Uruguay. The chapter aims to introduce several ideas of perception and neuroscience to first year students through the guiding question of whether the world is as we see it. In particular, the chapter discusses the question from three perspectives: an evolutionary perspective, a resource optimization perspective, and the perspective of ambiguity of sensory information.