Data Skeptic

More features are not always better! With an increasing number of features to consider, machine learning algorithms suffer from the curse of dimensionality, as they have a wider set and often sparser ...

26 Jun 201510min

This episode discusses video game analytics with guest Anders Drachen. The way in which people get access to games and the opportunity for game designers to ask interesting questions with data has cha...

19 Jun 201531min

This mini-episode discusses Anscombe's Quartet, a series of four datasets which are clearly very different but share some similar statistical properties with one another. For example, each of the four...

12 Jun 20159min

A recent episode of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe included a slight rant by Dr. Novella and the rouges about a shortcoming in operating systems.  This episode explores why such a (seemingly obvio...

9 Jun 201530min

Elizabeth Lee from CyArk joins us in this episode to share stories of the work done capturing important historical sites digitally. CyArk is a non-profit focused on using technology to preserve the wo...

5 Jun 201523min

Linhda and Kyle review a New York Times article titled How Your Hometown Affects Your Chances of Marriage. This article explores research about what correlates with the likelihood of being married by ...

29 Mai 201510min

With the advent of algorithms capable of beating highly ranked chess players, the temptation to cheat has emmerged as a potential threat to the integrity of this ancient and complex game. Yet, there a...

22 Mai 201544min

This week's episode dicusses z-scores, also known as standard score. This score describes the distance (in standard deviations) that an observation is away from the mean of the population. A closely r...

15 Mai 201510min