How do I become better at reading lemmas and algorithims?

Question

This may be a bit of a strange question but whenever I am confronted by a block of algorithms I get quite annoyed and confused (example below). It seems to me that the way of explaining concepts using mathematical symbols that I usually find not defined properly makes the understanding of the concept much more difficult for me to grasp. At the moment I am learning the Maths behind the K-Modes algorithm defined in Huang's paper. I understand it now but only when I found a resource that explained it in plain English. I frequently have this annoyance despite being a Statistics graduate who has dealt with a lot of this type of formulae. I would like to get better at reading this, are there any tips/books/resources that could help?

part of the K-modes being explained in Huang's paper

Answer 1

Programming the algorithms will help you understand the theory behind them, and will give you insights that are hard to obtain without actually getting your hands dirty in the computer. You can learn also from those times when you program an algorithm and it doesn't work as expected, then you debug it and find your bug and in the process gain deeper understand of the algorithm.

Trying small examples is also useful, preferably in the computer after programming them but also sometimes on paper.

Answer 2

I think a large part of your problem is here:

I understand it now but only when I found a resource that explained it in plain English.

Too few authors provide ideas in words to go along with the necessary formal arguments.

To decipher expressions like those in the image you provide, work out some small numerical examples in detail. Then try to construct the plain English explanation that should have been in the paper to begin with.