Data Skeptic

The F1 score is a model diagnostic that combines precision and recall to provide a singular evaluation for model comparison.  In this episode we discuss how it applies to selecting an interior designe...

23 Sep 20169min

Urban congestion effects every person living in a city of any reasonable size. Lewis Lehe joins us in this episode to share his work on downtown congestion pricing. We explore topics of how different ...

16 Sep 201635min

Heteroskedasticity is a term used to describe a relationship between two variables which has unequal variance over the range.  For example, the variance in the length of a cat's tail almost certainly ...

9 Sep 20168min

Our guest today is Michael Cuthbert, an associate professor of music at MIT and principal investigator of the Music21 project, which we focus our discussion on today. Music21 is a python library makin...

2 Sep 201634min

Paxos is a protocol for arriving a consensus in a distributed computing system which accounts for unreliability of the nodes.  We discuss how this might be used in the real world in the event of a mas...

26 Aug 201614min

Machine learning models are often criticized for being black boxes. If a human cannot determine why the model arrives at the decision it made, there's good cause for skepticism. Classic inspection app...

19 Aug 201635min

Analysis of variance is a method used to evaluate differences between the two or more groups.  It works by breaking down the total variance of the system into the between group variance and within gro...

12 Aug 201612min

When humans describe images, they have a reporting bias, in that the report only what they consider important. Thus, in addition to considering whether something is present in an image, one should con...

5 Aug 201623min