Stochastic Gradient Descent

For curve fitting using linear regression, there exists a minor variant of Batch Gradient Descent algorithm, called Stochastic Gradient Descent. In the Batch Gradient Descent, the parameter vector  is updated as, . (loop over all elements of training set in one iteration) For Stochastic Gradient Descent, the vector gets updated as, at each iteration the…

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Scaling factor in QAM

When QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) is used, typically one may find a scaling factor associated with the constellation mapping operation. It may be reasonably obvious that this scaling factor is for normalizing the average energy to one. This post attempts to compute the average energy of the 16-QAM, 64-QAM and M-QAM constellation (where is a…

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Negative Frequency

Last week, I received an email from Mr. Kishore. He was wondering about the physical significance of negative frequency. Does negative frequency really exist? Though I have seen conflicting views on the net (thread in complextoreal.com, thread in comp.dsp), my perspective is that negative frequency exist. The concept of negative frequency helps me a lot…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q24 (math)

Question 24 on math from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. Q24. Two independent random variables X and Y are uniformly distributed in the interval [-1, 1]. The probability that max[X,Y] is less than 1/2 is (A) 3/4 (B) 9/16 (C) 1/4 (D) 2/3

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Viterbi decoder

Coding is a technique where redundancy is added to original bit sequence to increase the reliability of the communication. Lets discuss a simple binary convolutional coding scheme at the transmitter and the associated Viterbi (maximum likelihood) decoding scheme at the receiver. Update: For some reason, the blog is unable to display the article which discuss…

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GATE-2012 ECE Q52 (electromagnetics)

Question 52 on electromagnetics from GATE (Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering) 2012 Electronics and Communication Engineering paper. An infinitely long uniform solid wire of radius  carries a uniform dc current of density . Q52. The magnetic field at a distance  from the center of the wire is proportional to (A)  for and for (B)  for  and  for  (C)  for  and  for  (D)  for  and  for  Solution…

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Receive diversity in AWGN

Some among you will be aware that in a wireless link having multiple antenna’s at the receiver (aka receive diversity) improves the bit error rate (BER) performance. In this post, let us try to understand the BER improvement with receive diversity. And, since we are just getting started, let us limit ourselves to additive white…

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