Data Skeptic

The central limit theorem is an important statistical result which states that typically, the mean of a large enough set of independent trials is approximately normally distributed.  This episode expl...

16 Okt 201513min

Today's guest is Chris Hofstader (@gonz_blinko), an accessibility researcher and advocate, as well as an activist for causes such as improving access to information for blind and vision impaired peopl...

9 Okt 201538min

The multi-armed bandit problem is named with reference to slot machines (one armed bandits). Given the chance to play from a pool of slot machines, all with unknown payout frequencies, how can you max...

2 Okt 201512min

Our episode this week begins with a correction. Back in episode 28 (Monkeys on Typewriters), Kyle made some bold claims about the probability that monkeys banging on typewriters might produce the enti...

25 Sep 201558min

There are several factors that are important to selecting an appropriate sample size and dealing with small samples. The most important questions are around representativeness - how well does your sam...

18 Sep 201513min

There's an old adage which says you cannot fit a model which has more parameters than you have data. While this is often the case, it's not a universal truth. Today's guest Jake VanderPlas explains th...

11 Sep 201530min

There are many occasions in which one might want to know the distance or similarity between two things, for which the means of calculating that distance is not necessarily clear. The distance between ...

4 Sep 201512min

ContentMine is a project which provides the tools and workflow to convert scientific literature into machine readable and machine interpretable data in order to facilitate better and more effective ac...

28 Aug 201553min