Data Skeptic

Today's topic is term frequency inverse document frequency, which is a statistic for estimating the importance of words and phrases in a set of documents.

11 Dec 201510min

Early astronomers could see several of the planets with the naked eye. The invention of the telescope allowed for further understanding of our solar system. The work of Isaac Newton allowed later scie...

4 Dec 201541min

Today's episode discusses the accuracy paradox. There are cases when one might prefer a less accurate model because it yields more predictive power or better captures the underlying causal factors des...

27 Nov 201517min

... or should this have been called data science from a neuroscientist's perspective? Either way, I'm sure you'll enjoy this discussion with Laurie Skelly. Laurie earned a PhD in Integrative Neuroscie...

20 Nov 201540min

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