Data Skeptic

Recently, we've seen opinion polls come under some skepticism.  But is that skepticism truly justified?  The recent Brexit referendum and US 2016 Presidential Election are examples where some claims t...

28 Apr 201752min

No reliable, complete database cataloging home sales data at a transaction level is available for the average person to access. To a data scientist interesting in studying this data, our hands are com...

21 Apr 201726min

There's more than one type of computer processor. The central processing unit (CPU) is typically what one means when they say "processor". GPUs were introduced to be highly optimized for doing floatin...

14 Apr 201711min

Backpropagation is a common algorithm for training a neural network.  It works by computing the gradient of each weight with respect to the overall error, and using stochastic gradient descent to iter...

7 Apr 201715min

In this week's episode of Data Skeptic, host Kyle Polich talks with guest Maura Church, Patreon's data science manager. Patreon is a fast-growing crowdfunding platform that allows artists and creators...

31 Mar 201732min

Feed Forward Neural Networks In a feed forward neural network, neurons cannot form a cycle. In this episode, we explore how such a network would be able to represent three common logical operators: OR...

24 Mar 201715min

In this Data Skeptic episode, Kyle is joined by guest Ruggiero Cavallo to discuss his latest efforts to mitigate the problems presented in this new world of online advertising. Working with his collab...

17 Mar 201741min

Today's episode overviews the perceptron algorithm. This rather simple approach is characterized by a few particular features. It updates its weights after seeing every example, rather than as a batch...

10 Mar 201714min