Shows / Data Skeptic
Data Skeptic
The Data Skeptic Podcast features interviews and discussion of topics related to data science, statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence and the like, all from the perspective of applying critical thinking and the scientific method to evaluate the veracity of claims and efficacy of approaches.
Episodes
- Data Skeptic
[MINI] AdaBoost
AdaBoost is a canonical example of the class of AnyBoost algorithms that create ensembles of weak learners. We discuss how a complex problem like predicting…
- Data Skeptic
Stealing Models from the Cloud
Platform as a service is a growing trend in data science where services like fraud analysis and face detection can be provided via APIs. Such services turn the…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Calculating Feature Importance
For machine learning models created with the random forest algorithm, there is no obvious diagnostic to inform you which features are more important in the…
- Data Skeptic
NYC Bike Share Rebalancing
As cities provide bike sharing services, they must also plan for how to redistribute bicycles as they inevitably build up at more popular destination stations…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Random Forest
Random forest is a popular ensemble learning algorithm which leverages bagging both for sampling and feature selection. In this episode we make an analogy to…
- Data Skeptic
Election Predictions
Jo Hardin joins us this week to discuss the ASA's Election Prediction Contest. This is a competition aimed at forecasting the results of the upcoming US…
Data Skeptic[MINI] F1 Score
The F1 score is a model diagnostic that combines precision and recall to provide a singular evaluation for model comparison. In this episode we discuss how it…
- Data Skeptic
Urban Congestion
Urban congestion effects every person living in a city of any reasonable size. Lewis Lehe joins us in this episode to share his work on downtown congestion…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Heteroskedasticity
Heteroskedasticity is a term used to describe a relationship between two variables which has unequal variance over the range. For example, the variance in the…
- Data Skeptic
Music21
Our guest today is Michael Cuthbert, an associate professor of music at MIT and principal investigator of the Music21 project, which we focus our discussion on…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Paxos
Paxos is a protocol for arriving a consensus in a distributed computing system which accounts for unreliability of the nodes. We discuss how this might be used…
- Data Skeptic
Trusting Machine Learning Models with LIME
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…
Data Skeptic[MINI] ANOVA
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…
- Data Skeptic
Machine Learning on Images with Noisy Human-centric Labels
When humans describe images, they have a reporting bias, in that the report only what they consider important. Thus, in addition to considering whether…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Survival Analysis
Survival analysis techniques are useful for studying the longevity of groups of elements or individuals, taking into account time considerations and right…
- Data Skeptic
Predictive Models on Random Data
This week is an insightful discussion with Claudia Perlich about some situations in machine learning where models can be built, perhaps by well-intentioned…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Curve
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…
- Data Skeptic
Multiple Comparisons and Conversion Optimization
I'm joined by Chris Stucchio this week to discuss how deliberate or uninformed statistical practitioners can derive spurious and arbitrary results via multiple…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Leakage
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…
- Data Skeptic
Predictive Policing
Kristian Lum (@KLdivergence) joins me this week to discuss her work at @hrdag on predictive policing. We also discuss Multiple Systems Estimation, a technique…
Data Skeptic[MINI] The CAP Theorem
Distributed computing cannot guarantee consistency, accuracy, and partition tolerance. Most system architects need to think carefully about how they should…
Data SkepticDetecting Terrorists with Facial Recognition?
A startup is claiming that they can detect terrorists purely through facial recognition. In this solo episode, Kyle explores the plausibility of these claims.
Data Skeptic[MINI] Goodhart's Law
Goodhart's law states that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". In this mini-episode we discuss how this affects SEO, call…
- Data Skeptic
Data Science at eHarmony
I'm joined this week by Jon Morra, director of data science at eHarmony to discuss a variety of ways in which machine learning and data science are being…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Stationarity and Differencing
Mystery shoppers and fruit cultivation help us discuss stationarity - a property of some time serieses that are invariant to time in several ways. Differencing…
- Data Skeptic
Feather
I'm joined by Wes McKinney (@wesmckinn) and Hadley Wickham (@hadleywickham) on this episode to discuss their joint project Feather. Feather is a file format…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Bargaining
Bargaining is the process of two (or more) parties attempting to agree on the price for a transaction. Game theoretic approaches attempt to find two strategies…
- Data Skeptic
deepjazz
Deepjazz is a project from Ji-Sung Kim, a computer science student at Princeton University. It is built using Theano, Keras, music21, and Evan Chow's project…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Auto-correlative functions and correlograms
When working with time series data, there are a number of important diagnostics one should consider to help understand more about the data. The…
- Data Skeptic
Early Identification of Violent Criminal Gang Members
This week I spoke with Elham Shaabani and Paulo Shakarian (@PauloShakASU) about their recent paper Early Identification of Violent Criminal Gang Members (also…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Fractional Factorial Design
A dinner party at Data Skeptic HQ helps teach the uses of fractional factorial design for studying 2-way interactions.
- Data Skeptic
Machine Learning Done Wrong
Cheng-tao Chu (@chengtao_chu) joins us this week to discuss his perspective on common mistakes and pitfalls that are made when doing machine learning. This…
Data SkepticPotholes
Co-host Linh Da was in a biking accident after hitting a pothole. She sustained an injury that required stitches. This is the story of our quest to file a 311…
Data Skeptic[MINI] The Elbow Method
Certain data mining algorithms (including k-means clustering and k-nearest neighbors) require a user defined parameter k. A user of these algorithms is…
- Data Skeptic
Too Good to be True
Today on Data Skeptic, Lachlan Gunn joins us to discuss his recent paper Too Good to be True. This paper highlights a somewhat paradoxical / counterintuitive…
Data Skeptic[MINI] R-squared
How well does your model explain your data? R-squared is a useful statistic for answering this question. In this episode we explore how it applies to the…
- Data Skeptic
Models of Mental Simulation
Jessica Hamrick joins us this week to discuss her work studying mental simulation. Her research combines machine learning approaches iwth behavioral method…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Multiple Regression
This episode is a discussion of multiple regression: the use of observations that are a vector of values to predict a response variable. For this episode, we…
- Data Skeptic
Scientific Studies of People's Relationship to Music
Samuel Mehr joins us this week to share his perspective on why people are musical, where music comes from, and why it works the way it does. We discuss a…
Data Skeptic[MINI] k-d trees
This episode reviews the concept of k-d trees: an efficient data structure for holding multidimensional objects. Kyle gives Linhda a dictionary and asks her to…
- Data Skeptic
Auditing Algorithms
Algorithms are pervasive in our society and make thousands of automated decisions on our behalf every day. The possibility of digital discrimination is a very…
Data Skeptic[MINI] The Bonferroni Correction
Today's episode begins by asking how many left handed employees we should expect to be at a company before anyone should claim left handedness discrimination…
- Data Skeptic
Detecting Pseudo-profound BS
A recent paper in the journal of Judgment and Decision Making titled On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit explores empirical questions…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Gradient Descent
Today's mini episode discusses the widely known optimization algorithm gradient descent in the context of hiking in a foggy hillside.
Data SkepticLet's Kill the Word Cloud
This episode is a discussion of data visualization and a proposed New Year's resolution for Data Skeptic listeners. Let's kill the word cloud.
Data Skeptic2015 Holiday Special
Today's episode is a reading of Isaac Asimov's The Machine that Won the War. I can't think of a story that's more appropriate for Data Skeptic.
- Data Skeptic
Wikipedia Revision Scoring as a Service
In this interview with Aaron Halfaker of the Wikimedia Foundation, we discuss his research and career related to the study of Wikipedia. In his paper The Rise…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency
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.
- Data Skeptic
The Hunt for Vulcan
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…
Data Skeptic[MINI] The Accuracy Paradox
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…
- Data Skeptic
Neuroscience from a Data Scientist's Perspective
... 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…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Bias Variance Tradeoff
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…
- Data Skeptic
Big Data Doesn't Exist
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…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Covariance and Correlation
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…
- Data Skeptic
Bayesian A/B Testing
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…
Data Skeptic[MINI] The Central Limit Theorem
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…
- Data Skeptic
Accessible Technology
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…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Multi-armed Bandit Problems
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…
Data SkepticShakespeare, Abiogenesis, and Exoplanets
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…
Data Skeptic[MINI] Sample Sizes
There are several factors that are important to selecting an appropriate sample size and dealing with small samples. The most important questions are around…