Hello, 

My name is Kungang Zhang, currently studying in PhD program in Northwestern 
University, Evanston, IL. My research including statistics, machine learning, 
optimization, and artificial intelligence. Currently, I am specifically 
interested in research in hyper-parameter tuning and efficient implementation 
of those algorithms. With more and more data and data stream, models is getting 
increasingly complex and optimizing them becomes very costly for a set of 
hyper-parameters. To find the best hyper-parameter is critical for good 
performance. This is an active field of research right now, but not many good 
and efficient implementations can be found out there. Cross-validation (or 
simple validation) is usually the to-go method, but too costly for large-scale 
model, limiting amount of data points, and online learning problems. Currently 
I am interested in implementing new algorithms to automate this tuning process, 
not only for categorical hyper-parameters, but also for continuous 
hyper-parameters. According to my research there are several methods but no 
definite answer which one is the best, so that implementing them in mlpack can 
help exploration of new ideas and new datasets and definitely improving the 
diversity in algorithms for hyper-parameter tuning.

This idea is related to my interest in reinforcement learning, because I got 
this idea from my interest in multi-arm bandit problem (a simple version of RL) 
and my last internship. It is kind of being proved working in real 
applications, but of course efficient implementation and new ideas are worth of 
more effort. I have reading mlpack mailing list for a while and think I can 
learn from and contribute to this community by doing this project (besides 
day-to-day interaction). I am considering applying GSoC 2019, even though there 
is no detailed project about hyper-parameter tuning in the idea list yet. Any 
advice on how to prepare ideas and proposals for this is very welcome. 

Also, I am currently interested in Reinforcement Learning. I also want to 
implement efficient algorithms for RL package and may be try some new ideas. 
Thank you very much!

Best Regards,
Kungang (Karl) Zhang
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>




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