siboehm

This is the website of Simon Boehm. I study Data Science at ETH Zurich and work at First Momentum Ventures, an early stage VC.

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  René Girard & Mimetic Theory for Non-Philosophers

  May 27, 2020
  

  Mimetic theory is a simple but immensely powerful concept. It explains how humans learn, why laws exist, and why too many people want to go into Finance. The idea was developed by René Girard, a french philosopher, member of the Académie Française and professor at Stanford. In the last few years, independent of Girard’s research, studies into imitation, formation of desire, and mirror neurons have been published that bring forward empirical justification for the theory. Let’s start by looking at the core concept of mimetic theory: Imitative desire.This is the primer I would have wanted to read before diving into the primary literature, which is eye-opening but can be dense.

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  The Normalizing Flow Network

  August 8, 2019
  

  The Normalizing Flow Network (NFN) is a normalizing-flow based regression model, great at modelling complex conditional densities. Look at our recent paper on noise regularization for conditional density estimation for some results of using the NFN on real-world and benchmark regression datasets.

  Here I’ll explain the structure of the NFN and go through some of the math. Implementations can be found in our Open-Source Python package as well as in my repo.