Two Cultures: Machine Learning and Statistics
It's a funny thing to realize, but data science modeling is usually about either explainability, interpretation and understanding, or it's about predictive accuracy. But usually not both--optimizing ...
5 Sep 201617min
Optimization Solutions
You've got an optimization problem to solve, and a less-than-forever amount of time in which to solve it. What do? Use a heuristic optimization algorithm, like a hill climber or simulated annealing-...
29 Aug 201620min
Optimization Problems
If modeling is about predicting the unknown, optimization tries to answer the question of what to do, what decision to make, to get the best results out of a given situation. Sometimes that's straigh...
22 Aug 201617min
Multi-level modeling for understanding DEADLY RADIOACTIVE GAS
Ok, this episode is only sort of about DEADLY RADIOACTIVE GAS. It's mostly about multilevel modeling, which is a way of building models with data that has distinct, related subgroups within it. What...
15 Aug 201623min
How Polls Got Brexit "Wrong"
Continuing the discussion of how polls do (and sometimes don't) tell us what to expect in upcoming elections--let's take a concrete example from the recent past, shall we? The Brexit referendum was, ...
8 Aug 201615min
Election Forecasting
Not sure if you heard, but there's an election going on right now. Polls, surveys, and projections about, as far as the eye can see. How to make sense of it all? How are the projections made? Whic...
1 Aug 201628min
Machine Learning for Genomics
Genomics data is some of the biggest #bigdata, and doing machine learning on it is unlocking new ways of thinking about evolution, genomic diseases like cancer, and what really makes each of us differ...
25 Juli 201620min
Climate Modeling
Hot enough for you? Climate models suggest that it's only going to get warmer in the coming years. This episode unpacks those models, so you understand how they work. A lot of the episodes we do ...
18 Juli 201619min
