Data Skeptic

Today's mini-episode explains the distinction between structured and unstructured data, and debates which of these categories best describe recipes.

21 Aug 201513min

Yusan Lin shares her research on using data science to explore the fashion industry in this episode. She has applied techniques from data mining, natural language processing, and social network analys...

14 Aug 201524min

PageRank is the algorithm most famous for being one of the original innovations that made Google stand out as a search engine. It was defined in the classic paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertex...

7 Aug 20158min

In this episode, Benjamin Uminsky enlightens us about some of the ways the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk leverages data science and analysis to help be more effective and efficien...

29 Jul 201541min

This episode explores the k-nearest neighbors algorithm which is an unsupervised, non-parametric method that can be used for both classification and regression. The basica concept is that it leverages...

24 Jul 20158min

How do people think rationally about small probability events? What is the optimal statistical process by which one can update their beliefs in light of new evidence? This episode of Data Skeptic expl...

17 Jul 20151h 24min

This mini-episode is a high level explanation of the basic idea behind MapReduce, which is a fundamental concept in big data. The origin of the idea comes from a Google paper titled MapReduce: Simplif...

10 Jul 201512min

The Credible Hulk joins me in this episode to discuss a recent blog post he wrote about glyphosate and the data about how it's introduction changed the historical usage trends of other herbicides. Lin...

3 Jul 201534min