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

A discussion of the expected number of cars at a stoplight frames today's discussion of the bias variance tradeoff. The central ideal of this concept relates to model complexity. A very simple model w...

13 Nov 201513min

The recent opinion piece Big Data Doesn't Exist on Tech Crunch by Slater Victoroff is an interesting discussion about the usefulness of data both big and small. Slater joins me this episode to discuss...

6 Nov 201532min

The degree to which two variables change together can be calculated in the form of their covariance. This value can be normalized to the correlation coefficient, which has the advantage of transformin...

30 Okt 201514min

Today's guest is Cameron Davidson-Pilon. Cameron has a masters degree in quantitative finance from the University of Waterloo. Think of it as statistics on stock markets. For the last two years he's b...

23 Okt 201530min

The central limit theorem is an important statistical result which states that typically, the mean of a large enough set of independent trials is approximately normally distributed.  This episode expl...

16 Okt 201513min

Today's guest is Chris Hofstader (@gonz_blinko), an accessibility researcher and advocate, as well as an activist for causes such as improving access to information for blind and vision impaired peopl...

9 Okt 201538min

The multi-armed bandit problem is named with reference to slot machines (one armed bandits). Given the chance to play from a pool of slot machines, all with unknown payout frequencies, how can you max...

2 Okt 201512min

Our episode this week begins with a correction. Back in episode 28 (Monkeys on Typewriters), Kyle made some bold claims about the probability that monkeys banging on typewriters might produce the enti...

25 Sep 201558min