Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Hot, Hot, HOT: Blog Dedicated to MVPA



In my whole world-wide wandering, I have concluded that nobody really knows what multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) is. For example, a couple of days ago I asked the checkout cashier at Target what MVPA was; he looked at me like some loutish knight beriddled by a troll.

I had nearly given up trying to understand what it was, until I stumbled upon this blog dedicated to vivisecting MVPA so that you can peer into the inner workings of this gruesome monstrosity. After having read this blog for the better part of an afternoon, I have concluded that it is able to make your wildest dreams come true and can answer any questions you could possibly have about MVPA, including discussions on the effect of different experiment parameters on classification accuracy, what a searchlight algorithm is, and what MVPA detects, exactly. It also includes, as far as I can tell, the only convincing argument in favor of allowing people to keep midgets as pets.

The author is a far more dedicated instructor than I am, with large swaths of R code accompanying most of the tutorials so that you can get a better feel for what's going on. I give this baby a 10/10.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks! You're making me blush. :)

    Though I must admit the mention of "pet midgets" has me confused ...

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    1. I was just trying to sweeten the deal - you know, getting people intrigued so that they visit the site, and eventually they forget about that reason.

      -Andy

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