Jonathan Pillow
jpillowtime.bsky.social
Jonathan Pillow
@jpillowtime.bsky.social
comp neuro prof @ Princeton
brains, machine learning, & postmodern angst

pillowlab.princeton.edu
This is excellent! 😂
August 27, 2025 at 10:08 AM
In fact, Robbins 1956 ("An empirical Bayes approach to statistics") doesn't even consider Gaussian likelihoods. Only Poisson, geometric, binomial. So I'm puzzled about why this is the go-to citation. Are there multiple versions of this paper floating around??
May 21, 2025 at 1:59 AM
Mind-boggling that HHMI would pull this right as other sources of funding for early stage investigators are drying up! 😢
May 20, 2025 at 1:47 AM
Haha, ok thanks! 😂
May 10, 2025 at 2:17 AM
Wow, great — thanks! I didn't know about CB education articles, but that could indeed be a good fit. It is indeed seeking to give technical — albeit (I hope) accessible — details of the derivations!
May 8, 2025 at 10:17 PM
Ok, awesome — thanks for this suggestion! I didn't know about this journal before...
May 8, 2025 at 10:15 PM
Cool — thanks for the suggestion! Although the web-page here "New Methods", which this paper is not. (Rather it's trying to give a clear, accessible description of an old method). Do you think that could fly?
May 8, 2025 at 10:14 PM
Congrats, Takaki — this is super-cool!!
May 8, 2025 at 8:33 PM
But there are no new results, per se. Any thoughts or suggestions for where to publish would be most appreciated!
May 8, 2025 at 8:30 PM
The RRR estimator dates back to Izenman 1975, but we have found the original stats literature a bit hard to digest. So our paper paper aims to build intuition and give a simple derivation of RRR, along with several extensions (e.g., L2 regularization, non-isotropic noise).
May 8, 2025 at 8:30 PM
By way of background: RRR is the method used for estimating a "communication subspace" between brain regions, introduced in Semedo et al 2019, and now growing in popularity for the analysis of multi-region datasets.
May 8, 2025 at 8:29 PM
"Replacing animals with human-centered tools will provide better insight into human biology, speeding up the development of much-needed treatments for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease." 🤦‍♂️

The fact that the author refers to animal research as "animal testing" also reveals a lot.
January 15, 2025 at 10:54 PM
Great thread, @jbarbosa.org ! 🙌
December 11, 2024 at 6:19 PM
Another relevant paper here is this beautiful analysis from Elsayed & Cunningham (NN 2017) which describes a new test for rotational dynamics (derived using maximum entropy).

See original paper: www.nature.com/articles/nn....

or Mikio Aoi's & my news & views: www.nature.com/articles/nn....
Is population activity more than the sum of its parts? - Nature Neuroscience
A study introduces innovative ways to test whether neural population activity exhibits structure above and beyond that of its basic components.
www.nature.com
December 11, 2024 at 6:16 PM
NATURALLY!
December 8, 2024 at 4:42 AM