I’m running somewhat behind this week. It really can’t be helped – I had to travel to Philadelphia three times this week (once I’m there, I have a very difficult time concentrating on my work, and the three hour commute drains me for more or less the rest of the day), I’m trying to perform experiments for the first time since I began writing, and my machine learning workload is transitioning from “unreasonably heavy” to “sadistic”. Despite this, I did manage to finish off about five pages thus far, mostly dealing with the nuances of the tensor/outer product and with things like PARAFAC. The methodology section is probably going to need to wait until next week, since I don’t know how quickly I can get experimental results with all of the other things going on.

Fortunately, I planned a timeline that has me finishing approximately 6 months before I need to defend – I have plenty of time to spare 🙂

If my ML load was a bit lighter this week, I could even meet my weekly goal by tomorrow. Unfortunately, not only is it heavy, but the professor decided to make it a competition. I abhor competitive research almost as much as competitive programming (I only competed in one programming contest, when I was 15, which I won to the detriment of some very talented programmers who really should have been lauded for their efforts and talent) – it fosters a spirit of treachery and ensures that the total number of people performing well remains very small. There’s already enough adversity in research; I fail to see why we need to add more.

In any case, I am now bound by the Red Queen hypothesis. I can’t simply submit functional homework; now I have to keep improving it to the extent that it is more accurate than the other students’ submissions.

I’m probably safe if I can get my cross-validated accuracy above 90%.