ABSTRACT
In the year 1985, Clive Wearing lost his mind, but not his music. Wearing was a musicologist and accomplished musician, but the same virus that causes cold sores, Herpes simplex, snuck into his brain and ate his hippocampus. Anterograde amnesia is bad for learning about the world. People want models that instead use all of the information in savvy ways. This does not mean treating all clusters as if they were the same. Instead it means learning simultaneously about each cluster while learning about the population of clusters. What pooling means is that each tank provides information that can be used to improve the estimates for all of the other tanks. Varying intercepts are just regularized estimates, but adaptively regularized by estimating how diverse the clusters are while estimating the features of each cluster. The easiest task is to just compute the no-pooling estimates.
