Data Skeptic

This episode contains converage of the 2015 Data Fest hosted at UCLA.  Data Fest is an analysis competition that gives teams of students 48 hours to explore a new dataset and present novel findings.  ...

28 Apr 201527min

For our 50th episode we enduldge a bit by cooking Linhda's previously mentioned "healthy" cornbread.  This leads to a discussion of the statistical topic of overdispersion in which the variance of som...

24 Apr 201515min

This episode overviews some of the fundamental concepts of natural language processing including stemming, n-grams, part of speech tagging, and th bag of words approach.

17 Apr 201513min

Guest Youyou Wu discuses the work she and her collaborators did to measure the accuracy of computer based personality judgments. Using Facebook "like" data, they found that machine learning approaches...

10 Apr 201531min

This episode explores how going wine testing could teach us about using markov chain monte carlo (mcmc).

3 Apr 201515min

This episode introduces the idea of a Markov Chain. A Markov Chain has a set of states describing a particular system, and a probability of moving from one state to another along every valid connected...

20 Mar 201511min

Nicole Goebel joins us this week to share her experiences in oceanography studying phytoplankton and other aspects of the ocean and how data plays a role in that science.   We also discuss Thinkful ...

13 Mar 201533min

This episode explores Ordinary Least Squares or OLS - a method for finding a good fit which describes a given dataset.

6 Mar 201518min