Data Contamination
Supervised machine learning assumes that the features and labels used for building a classifier are isolated from each other--basically, that you can't cheat by peeking. Turns out this can be easier ...
2 Touko 201620min
Model Interpretation (and Trust Issues)
Machine learning algorithms can be black boxes--inputs go in, outputs come out, and what happens in the middle is anybody's guess. But understanding how a model arrives at an answer is critical for i...
25 Huhti 201616min
Updates! Political Science Fraud and AlphaGo
We've got updates for you about topics from past shows! First, the political science scandal of the year 2015 has a new chapter, we'll remind you about the original story and then dive into what has ...
18 Huhti 201631min
Ecological Inference and Simpson's Paradox
Simpson's paradox is the data science equivalent of looking through one eye and seeing a very clear trend, and then looking through the other eye and seeing the very clear opposite trend. In one case...
11 Huhti 201618min
Discriminatory Algorithms
Sometimes when we say an algorithm discriminates, we mean it can tell the difference between two types of items. But in this episode, we'll talk about another, more troublesome side to discrimination...
4 Huhti 201615min
Recommendation Engines and Privacy
This episode started out as a discussion of recommendation engines, like Netflix uses to suggest movies. There's still a lot of that in here. But a related topic, which is both interesting and impor...
28 Maalis 201631min
Neural nets play cops and robbers (AKA generative adverserial networks)
One neural net is creating counterfeit bills and passing them off to a second neural net, which is trying to distinguish the real money from the fakes. Result: two neural nets that are better than ei...
21 Maalis 201618min
A Data Scientist's View of the Fight against Cancer
In this episode, we're taking many episodes' worth of insights and unpacking an extremely complex and important question--in what ways are we winning the fight against cancer, where might that fight g...
14 Maalis 201619min
