Machine Learning Blog

Pnuemonia Detection

In this project, we built a convolutional neural network (CNN) to embed chest X-ray images into a latent space, then compared three binary classifiers—Support Vector Machine, XGBoost, and Transformer—on their ability to detect pneumonia.

Lia Smith, Cameron Hudson, Robsan Dinka, Emmanuel Towner

Advanced Optimization

In this blog post, I explore three advanced optimization techniques—Newton’s Method, the Adam optimizer, and Gradient Descent Optimizer—in the context of logistic regression applied to heart disease prediction. The goal is to understand how different optimization algorithms influence model performance and training dynamics in a binary classification tasks.

Emmanuel Towner

Sparse Kernel Machines

In this post, I implement a sparse kernel logistic regression using radial basis function (RBF) kernels. Additionally, explore how regularization strength (𝜆) and the bandwidth (𝛾) effect influence it’s sparsity and overfitting.

Emmanuel Towner

Overfitting and Double Descents

In this blog post, I explore the deep learning phenomenon of overfitting and the resulting double descent using a linear regression model and an overparameterized optimizer. I evaluated the model by its mean squared error (MSE) based on number of features.

Emmanuel Towner

Implementing Logistic Regression

This blog post implements logistic regression with momentum from scratch in Python and performs three experiments evaluating the loss and accuracy.

Emmanuel Towner

Auditing Bias

In this blog post, my goal was to make a prediction of employment status based on various demographics excluding race using a subset of data from the American Community Service focused on Massachusetts residents in 2023. After training a model on this data, I evaluated its performance and examined potential biases in its predictions.

Emmanuel Towner

Classifying Palmer Penguins

In this blog post, I analyze the Palmer Penguins dataset to identify the best features for determining penguin species based on their measurements.

Emmanuel Towner