Linear Digressions

Linear regression is a great tool if you want to make predictions about the mean value that an outcome will have given certain values for the inputs. But what if you want to predict the median? Or the...

28 Jan 201921min

When data scientists use a linear regression to look for causal relationships between a treatment and an outcome, what they’re usually finding is the so-called average treatment effect. In other words...

20 Jan 201917min

When you build a model for natural language processing (NLP), such as a recurrent neural network, it helps a ton if you’re not starting from zero. In other words, if you can draw upon other datasets f...

14 Jan 201927min

Facial recognition being used in everyday life seemed far-off not too long ago. Increasingly, it’s being used and advanced widely and with increasing speed, which means that our technical capabilities...

7 Jan 201942min

Bringing you another old classic this week, as we gear up for 2019! See you next week with new content. Word2Vec is probably the go-to algorithm for vectorizing text data these days.  Which makes sen...

31 Dec 201817min

We’re taking a break for the holidays, chilling with the dog and an eggnog (Katie) and the cat and some spiced cider (Ben). Here’s an episode from a while back for you to enjoy. See you again in 2019!...

23 Dec 201815min

Convex optimization is one of the keys to data science, both because some problems straight-up call for optimization solutions and because popular algorithms like a gradient descent solution to ordina...

17 Dec 201820min

When you think about it, it’s pretty amazing that we can draw conclusions about huge populations, even the whole world, based on datasets that are comparatively very small (a few thousand, or a few hu...

9 Dec 201827min