Linear Digressions

Hey, sick of the election yet? Fear not, there are algorithms that can automagically generate political-ish speech so that we never need to be without an endless supply of Congressional speeches and ...

11 Mars 201620min

Multi-armed bandits: how to take your randomized experiment and make it harder better faster stronger. Basically, a multi-armed bandit experiment allows you to optimize for both learning and making u...

7 Mars 201611min

"People with a family history of heart disease are more likely to eat healthy foods, and have a high incidence of heart attacks." Did the healthy food cause the heart attacks? Probably not. But est...

4 Mars 201616min

The reason that neural nets are taking over the world right now is because they can be efficiently trained with the backpropagation algorithm. In short, backprop allows you to adjust the weights of t...

29 Feb 201612min

First up in this episode: a crash course in natural language processing, and important steps if you want to use machine learning techniques on text data. Then we'll take that NLP know-how and talk ab...

26 Feb 201622min

Artificial intelligence includes a number of different strategies for how to make machines more intelligent, and often more human-like, in their ability to learn and solve problems. An ambitious grou...

22 Feb 201617min

Survival analysis is all about studying how long until an event occurs--it's used in marketing to study how long a customer stays with a service, in epidemiology to estimate the duration of survival o...

19 Feb 201615min

All aboard the gravitational waves bandwagon--with the first direct observation of gravitational waves announced this week, Katie's dusting off her physics PhD for a very special gravity-related episo...

15 Feb 201620min