Economic Modeling and Prediction, Charitable Giving, and a Follow Up with Peter Backus

Machine learning models are often criticized for being black boxes. If a human cannot determine why the model arrives at the decision it made, there's good cause for skepticism. Classic inspection app...

19 Aug 201635min

Analysis of variance is a method used to evaluate differences between the two or more groups.  It works by breaking down the total variance of the system into the between group variance and within gro...

12 Aug 201612min

When humans describe images, they have a reporting bias, in that the report only what they consider important. Thus, in addition to considering whether something is present in an image, one should con...

5 Aug 201623min

Survival analysis techniques are useful for studying the longevity of groups of elements or individuals, taking into account time considerations and right censorship. This episode explores how surviva...

29 Juli 201614min

This week is an insightful discussion with Claudia Perlich about some situations in machine learning where models can be built, perhaps by well-intentioned practitioners, to appear to be highly predic...

22 Juli 201636min

An ROC curve is a plot that compares the trade off of true positives and false positives of a binary classifier under different thresholds. The area under the curve (AUC) is useful in determining how ...

15 Juli 201611min

I'm joined by Chris Stucchio this week to discuss how deliberate or uninformed statistical practitioners can derive spurious and arbitrary results via multiple comparisons. We discuss p-hacking and a ...

8 Juli 201630min

If you'd like to make a good prediction, your best bet is to invent a time machine, visit the future, observe the value, and return to the past. For those without access to time travel technology, we ...

1 Juli 201612min