Linear Digressions

The Google ads auction is a special kind of auction, one you might not know as well as the famous English auction (which we talked about in the last episode). But if it's what Google uses to sell bil...

25 Jan 201617min

The Google AdWords algorithm is (famously) an auction system for allocating a massive amount of online ad space in real time--with that fascinating use case in mind, this episode is part one in a two-...

22 Jan 201612min

A data visualization extravaganza in this episode, as we discuss Chernoff faces (you: "faces? huh?" us: "oh just you wait") and the greatest data visualization of all time, or at least the Napoleonic ...

18 Jan 201615min

Ever tried to visualize a cluster of data points in 40 dimensions? Or even 4, for that matter? We prefer to stick to 2, or maybe 3 if we're feeling well-caffeinated. The t-SNE algorithm is one of t...

15 Jan 201616min

The town of [expletive deleted], England, is responsible for the clbuttic [expletive deleted] problem. This week on Linear Digressions: we try really hard not to swear too much. Related links: https...

11 Jan 20169min

In order to do supervised learning, you need a labeled training dataset. Or do you...? Relevant links: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~dplewis/candidacy/goldman00enhancing.pdf

8 Jan 201612min

Machine learning: it can be fooled, just like you or me. Here's one of our favorite examples, a study into hacking neural networks. Relevant links: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.1897v4.pdf

5 Jan 201615min

Zipf's law is related to the statistics of how word usage is distributed. As it turns out, this is also strikingly reminiscent of how income is distributed, and populations of cities, and bug reports...

31 Des 201511min