Data Skeptic

Cheng-tao Chu (@chengtao_chu) joins us this week to discuss his perspective on common mistakes and pitfalls that are made when doing machine learning. This episode is filled with sage advice for begin...

1 Apr 201625min

Co-host Linh Da was in a biking accident after hitting a pothole. She sustained an injury that required stitches. This is the story of our quest to file a 311 complaint and track it through the City o...

25 Mar 201641min

Certain data mining algorithms (including k-means clustering and k-nearest neighbors) require a user defined parameter k. A user of these algorithms is required to select this value, which raises the ...

18 Mar 201615min

Today on Data Skeptic, Lachlan Gunn joins us to discuss his recent paper Too Good to be True. This paper highlights a somewhat paradoxical / counterintuitive fact about how unanimity is unexpected in...

11 Mar 201635min

How well does your model explain your data? R-squared is a useful statistic for answering this question. In this episode we explore how it applies to the problem of valuing a house. Aspects like the n...

4 Mar 201613min

Jessica Hamrick joins us this week to discuss her work studying mental simulation. Her research combines machine learning approaches iwth behavioral method from cognitive science to help explain how p...

26 Feb 201639min

This episode is a discussion of multiple regression: the use of observations that are a vector of values to predict a response variable. For this episode, we consider how features of a home such as th...

19 Feb 201618min

Samuel Mehr joins us this week to share his perspective on why people are musical, where music comes from, and why it works the way it does. We discuss a number of empirical studies related to music a...

12 Feb 201642min