Optimization Lab

Astroinformatics Summer School 2022

Organized by Penn State Center for Astrostatistics

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Lab Tutorials:

• gradient_descent.jl (Pluto notebook): Introduction to optimization algorithms, with a focus on gradient descent

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Running Labs

Instructions will be provided for students to run labs on AWS severs during the summer school. Below are instruction for running them outside of the summer school.

Running Pluto notebooks on your local computer

Summer School participants will be provided instructions for accessing a Pluto server. Others may install Julia and Pluto on their local computer with the following steps:

1. Download and install current version of Julia from julialang.org.
2. Run julia
3. From the Julia REPL (command line), type

julia> using Pkg
julia> Pkg.add("Pluto")

(Steps 1 & 3 only need to be done once per computer.)

4. Start Pluto

julia> using Pluto
julia> Pluto.run()

5. Open the Pluto notebook for your lab

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Additional Links

• GitHub respository for all of Astroinformatics Summer school
• Astroinformatics Summer school Website & registration

Contributing

We welcome people filing issues and/or pull requests to improve these labs for future summer schools.