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
Congress Bots and DeepDrumpf
Hey, sick of the election yet? Fear not, there are algorithms that can automagically generate political-ish speech so that we never need to be without an endless supply of Congressional speeches and ...
11 Maalis 201620min
Multi - Armed Bandits
Multi-armed bandits: how to take your randomized experiment and make it harder better faster stronger. Basically, a multi-armed bandit experiment allows you to optimize for both learning and making u...
7 Maalis 201611min
Experiments and Messy, Tricky Causality
"People with a family history of heart disease are more likely to eat healthy foods, and have a high incidence of heart attacks." Did the healthy food cause the heart attacks? Probably not. But est...
4 Maalis 201616min
