Linear Digressions

Latest Episodes:

Re - Release: Random Kanye Dec 24, 2017

Show notes

We have a throwback episode for you today as we take the week off to enjoy the holidays. This week: what happens when you have a markov chain that generates mashup Kanye West lyrics with Bible verses? Exactly what you think.

Debiasing Word Embeddings Dec 18, 2017

Show notes

When we covered the Word2Vec algorithm for embedding words, we mentioned parenthetically that the word embeddings it produces can sometimes be a little bit less than ideal--in particular, gender bias from our society can creep into the embeddings and give results that are sexist. For example, occupational words like "doctor" and "nurse" are more highly aligned with "man" or "woman," which can create problems because these word embeddings are used in algorithms that help people find information or make decisions. However, a group of researchers has released a new paper detailing ways to de-bias the embeddings, so we retain gender info that's not particularly problematic (for example, "king" vs. "queen") while correcting bias.

The Kernel Trick and Support Vector Machines Dec 11, 2017

Show notes

Picking up after last week's episode about maximal margin classifiers, this week we'll go into the kernel trick and how that (combined with maximal margin algorithms) gives us the much-vaunted support vector machine.

Maximal Margin Classifiers Dec 04, 2017

Show notes

Maximal margin classifiers are a way of thinking about supervised learning entirely in terms of the decision boundary between two classes, and defining that boundary in a way that maximizes the distance from any given point to the boundary. It's a neat way to think about statistical learning and a prerequisite for understanding support vector machines, which we'll cover next week--stay tuned!

Re - Release: The Cocktail Party Problem Nov 27, 2017

Show notes

Grab a cocktail, put on your favorite karaoke track, and let’s talk some more about disentangling audio data!

Clustering with DBSCAN Nov 20, 2017

Show notes

DBSCAN is a density-based clustering algorithm for doing unsupervised learning. It's pretty nifty: with just two parameters, you can specify "dense" regions in your data, and grow those regions out organically to find clusters. In particular, it can fit irregularly-shaped clusters, and it can also identify outlier points that don't belong to any of the clusters. Pretty cool!

The Kaggle Survey on Data Science Nov 13, 2017

Show notes

Want to know what's going on in data science these days? There's no better way than to analyze a survey with over 16,000 responses that recently released by Kaggle. Kaggle asked practicing and aspiring data scientists about themselves, their tools, how they find jobs, what they find challenging about their jobs, and many other questions. Then Kaggle released an interactive summary of the data, as well as the anonymized dataset itself, to help data scientists understand the trends in the data. In this episode, we'll go through some of the survey toplines that we found most interesting and counterintuitive.

Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt Nov 06, 2017

Show notes

This week, we've got a fun paper by our friends at Google about the hidden costs of maintaining machine learning workflows. If you've worked in software before, you're probably familiar with the idea of technical debt, which are inefficiencies that crop up in the code when you're trying to go fast. You take shortcuts, hard-code variable values, skimp on the documentation, and generally write not-that-great code in order to get something done quickly, and then end up paying for it later on. This is technical debt, and it's particularly easy to accrue with machine learning workflows. That's the premise of this episode's paper.

Improving Upon a First-Draft Data Science Analysis Oct 30, 2017

Show notes

There are a lot of good resources out there for getting started with data science and machine learning, where you can walk through starting with a dataset and ending up with a model and set of predictions. Think something like the homework for your favorite machine learning class, or your most recent online machine learning competition. However, if you've ever tried to maintain a machine learning workflow (as opposed to building it from scratch), you know that taking a simple modeling script and turning it into clean, well-structured and maintainable software is way harder than most people give it credit for. That said, if you're a professional data scientist (or want to be one), this is one of the most important skills you can develop. In this episode, we'll walk through a workshop Katie is giving at the Open Data Science Conference in San Francisco in November 2017, which covers building a machine learning workflow that's more maintainable than a simple script. If you'll be at ODSC, come say hi, and if you're not, here's a sneak preview!

Survey Raking Oct 23, 2017

Show notes

It's quite common for survey respondents not to be representative of the larger population from which they are drawn. But if you're a researcher, you need to study the larger population using data from your survey respondents, so what should you do? Reweighting the survey data, so that things like demographic distributions look similar between the survey and general populations, is a standard technique and in this episode we'll talk about survey raking, a way to calculate survey weights when there are several distributions of interest that need to be matched.

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Linear Digressions

Related Podcasts

1

2

3

4

5

6