Thinking of data science initiatives as innovation initiatives
Put yourself in the shoes of an executive at a big legacy company for a moment, operating in virtually any market vertical: you’re constantly hearing that data science is revolutionizing the world and...
10 Feb 202017min
Building a curriculum for educating data scientists: Interview with Prof. Xiao-Li Meng
As demand for data scientists grows, and it remains as relevant as ever that practicing data scientists have a solid methodological and technical foundation for their work, higher education institutio...
2 Feb 202031min
Running experiments when there are network effects
Traditional A/B tests assume that whether or not one person got a treatment has no effect on the experiment outcome for another person. But that’s not a safe assumption, especially when there are netw...
27 Jan 202024min
Zeroing in on what makes adversarial examples possible
Adversarial examples are really, really weird: pictures of penguins that get classified with high certainty by machine learning algorithms as drumsets, or random noise labeled as pandas, or any one of...
20 Jan 202022min
Unsupervised Dimensionality Reduction: UMAP vs t-SNE
Dimensionality reduction redux: this episode covers UMAP, an unsupervised algorithm designed to make high-dimensional data easier to visualize, cluster, etc. It’s similar to t-SNE but has some advanta...
13 Jan 202029min
Data scientists: beware of simple metrics
Picking a metric for a problem means defining how you’ll measure success in solving that problem. Which sounds important, because it is, but oftentimes new data scientists only get experience with a f...
5 Jan 202024min
Communicating data science, from academia to industry
For something as multifaceted and ill-defined as data science, communication and sharing best practices across the field can be extremely valuable but also extremely, well, multifaceted and ill-define...
30 Dec 201926min
Optimizing for the short-term vs. the long-term
When data scientists run experiments, like A/B tests, it’s really easy to plan on a period of a few days to a few weeks for collecting data. The thing is, the change that’s being evaluated might have ...
23 Dec 201919min
