My first foray into Rust: Querying data from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis

Binghao Ng

2022-05-21 22:56

I’ve been enamoured by the Rust typing system and safety for some time now. After attending a couple of Udemy courses, I decided to get my hands dirty on an actual project. So I thought to replicate something I’ve done before in Python, which is to create a library that would help to obtain data from the Federal Reserve of St. Louis (FRED) data REST API.

Here are some of the deepest impressions that Rust has left on me in my little project.

Gitlab Repo Crates.io

Variational Inference: Kullback-Leibler Divergence and Likelihood

Binghao Ng

2021-12-10 16:00

An important relationship in variational learning is that between the Kullback-Leibler divergence and the likelihood. It also happens to be a relation that I always fumble and have to scramble through paper to find when I need it. So I'm writing it here once and for all.

Thoughts on the Innovation Process

Binghao Ng

2021-10-24 18:32

Innovation is a messy endeavour. You never know whether you are heading in the right direction and you fail all the time. A lot, if not most, of your ideas are useless, impractical and just fluff. To an outsider, it looks like you are wasting a lot of resources and meandering around aimlessly. In an organization, the sense that innovation is just a giant waste of time and a drag on the rest of the organization can feel acute.

Innovation is also necessary, both in our personal lives and the organizations we work in. How else would one break new ground? How can an organization solve problems better, faster and cheaper in ways that they don't already know? How can we discover new green fields to play in if we don't lift our heads up and look around and beyond?

The question is, how do we manage the tension between the chaos of creative forces and the orderly march towards realizing real world benefits, both in our personal lives and our organizations? How do we meander effectively?

Note to self: ERC-20 Tokens

Binghao Ng

2021-09-26 00:17

The idea of tokens play a special role in blockchain networks like Ethereum. It represents an asset or a right to a resource on the blockchain. For example, tokens can represent a unit of a cryptocurrency created on a blockchain network such as Ethereum, a stake in a company, access rights to a dataset or ownership of a piece of artwork.

Enterprise Data Science. It’s complicated.

Binghao Ng

2021-07-20 00:21

In 2017 I wrote a blog post on how data science efforts should be about building representations and nothing else. Now in 2021, four years older, I have different thoughts. I have come to realize that my thoughts four years ago were too myopic, too technically oriented. As it turns out, enterprise data science, like many things in life, is complicated.

On Time-varying Markov Systems

Binghao Ng

2021-07-03 17:52

In this article I consider a discrete time Markov system which has a transition matrix that is not constant over time. The derivation of the forward and backward Chapman-Kolmogorov equations is then shown.

In Markovian systems, the transition matrix determines the behaviour of the system and the Chapman-Kolmogorov equation is important as it allows us to associate the transition probability matrix, which may not be constant, changes the system across time and allows us to move through the system forwards and backwards in time, exploring the system behaviour fully.

Such systems are often encountered in real-world processes. For example, the transition probability of commuters on a train system will depend on the time of the day and day of the week.

Basic Structure of Markovian Population Models

Binghao Ng

2021-06-14 17:05

When considering Markov systems, we are often interested in the behaviour of the population of individuals traversing through the graph rather than that of an individual. For example, we might be interested in how crowds move through a shopping mall when entering from different entrances. In such a situation, we would be interested in the crowd density that can be attributed to a particular entrance at some store and time.

On Growth Trajectories

Binghao Ng

2021-04-29 22:38

There are many ways to think about growth in various aspects of one's life. A useful mental model is that of a Sigmoid curve.

$$\text{growth} = \frac{A}{1+\exp(-B t + C)}$$

$B$ will determine how steep your progress is, $C$ will determine when that steep progression happens and $A$ determines the level at which saturation happens. All the above parameters are functions of your trajectory.

Apache SPARK: Setting up and Use with IPython Notebooks

Binghao Ng

2017-07-21 22:58

When it comes to exploring and analysing large amounts of data, few tools beat the Apache Spark - IPython Notebook combination. However, in my journey to set up and use Apache Spark for my work, I often had to go through a lot of trial and error as the instructions often assume certain knowledge of Spark's internal settings. I had to plough through documentation in various places before I could get a reasonably working Spark + IPython setup going. So here I chronicle my experience in setting up Apache Spark for use with IPython notebooks, attempting at each step to explain the rationale and the settings used.

Log-Sum-Exp Trick

Binghao Ng

2017-06-05 21:50

The Log-Sum-Exp trick is a really cool computational trick to prevent overflow or underflow when computing the log of the sum of exponentials (exactly as it name suggests!). I got to know about it while trying to code up mixture density networks which required me to calculate the log of the sum of a bunch of Gaussian distributions for its log-likelihood.