Even as we rely more and more on machine learning algorithms to help with everyday decision-making, we're learning more and more about how they're frighteningly easy to fool sometimes. Today we have a roundup of a few successful efforts to create robust adversarial examples, including what it means for an adversarial example to be robust and what this might mean for machine learning in the future.
This week's episode is just in time for JupyterCon in NYC, August 22-25... Jupyter notebooks are probably familiar to a lot of data nerds out there as a great open-source tool for exploring data, doing quick visualizations, and packaging code snippets with explanations for sharing your work with others. If you're not a data person, or you are but you haven't tried out Jupyter notebooks yet, here's your nudge to go give them a try. In this episode we'll go back to the old days, before notebooks, ...
Today, a dispatch on what can go wrong when machine learning hype outpaces reality: a high-profile partnership between IBM Watson and MD Anderson Cancer Center has recently hit the rocks as it turns out to be tougher than expected to cure cancer with artificial intelligence. There are enough conflicting accounts in the media to make it tough to say exactly went wrong, but it's a good chance to remind ourselves that even in a post-AI world, hard problems remain hard.
Kullback Leibler divergence, or KL divergence, is a measure of information loss when you try to approximate one distribution with another distribution. It comes to us originally from information theory, but today underpins other, more machine-learning-focused algorithms like t-SNE. And boy oh boy can it be tough to explain. But we're trying our hardest in this episode!
It's moneyball time! SABR (the Society for American Baseball Research) is the world's largest organization of statistics-minded baseball enthusiasts, who are constantly applying the craft of scientific analysis to trying to figure out who are the best baseball teams and players. It can be hard to objectively measure sports greatness, but baseball has a data-rich history and plenty of nerdy fans interested in analyzing that data. In this episode we'll dissect a few of the metrics from standard ba...
We're back again with friend of the pod Walt, former software engineer extraordinaire and current data scientist extraordinaire, to talk about some best practices from software engineering that are ready to jump the fence over to data science. If last week's episode was for software engineers who are interested in becoming more like data scientists, then this week's episode is for data scientists who are looking to improve their game with best practices from software engineering.
Data scientists and software engineers often work side by side, building out and scaling technical products and services that are data-heavy but also require a lot of software engineering to build and maintain. In this episode, we'll chat with a Friend of the Pod named Walt, who started out as a software engineer but works as a data scientist now. We'll talk about that transition from software engineering to data science, and what special capabilities software engineers have that data scientists...
This episode was first released in November 2014. In the 1850s, there were a lot of things we didn’t know yet: how to create an airplane, how to split an atom, or how to control the spread of a common but deadly disease: cholera. When a cholera outbreak in London killed scores of people, a doctor named John Snow used it as a chance to study whether the cause might be very small organisms that were spreading through the water supply (the prevailing theory at the time was miasma, or “bad air”). By...
This episode was first release in February 2015. In 2000, Enron was one of the largest and companies in the world, praised far and wide for its innovations in energy distribution and many other markets. By 2002, it was apparent that many bad apples had been cooking the books, and billions of dollars and thousands of jobs disappeared. In the aftermath, surprisingly, one of the greatest datasets in all of machine learning was born--the Enron emails corpus. Hundreds of thousands of emails amongst t...
What do you get when you cross a support vector machine with matrix factorization? You get a factorization machine, and a darn fine algorithm for recommendation engines.
Anscombe's Quartet is a set of four datasets that have the same mean, variance and correlation but look very different. It's easy to think that having a good set of summary statistics (like mean, variance and correlation) can tell you everything important about a dataset, or at least enough to know if two datasets are extremely similar or extremely different, but Anscombe's Quartet will always be standing behind you, laughing at how silly that idea is. Anscombe's Quartet was devised in 1973 as a...
Originally release June 2016 This episode is for all you (us) traffic nerds--we're talking about the hidden structure underlying traffic on-ramp metering systems. These systems slow down the flow of traffic onto highways so that the highways don't get overloaded with cars and clog up. If you're someone who listens to podcasts while commuting, and especially if your area has on-ramp metering, you'll never look at highway access control the same way again (yeah, we know this is super nerdy; it's a...
The year: 1998. The size of the web: 150 million pages. The problem: information retrieval. How do you find the "best" web pages to return in response to a query? A graduate student named Larry Page had an idea for how it could be done better and created a search engine as a research project. That search engine was called Google.
We chat about fractional dimensions, and what the actual heck those are.
As more and more data gets collected seemingly every day, and data scientists use that data for modeling, the technical limits associated with machine learning on big datasets keep getting pushed back. This week is a first-hand case study in using scikit-learn (a popular python machine learning library) on multi-terabyte datasets, which is something that Katie does a lot for her day job at Civis Analytics. There are a lot of considerations for doing something like this--cloud computing, artful u...
If you're anything like us, you a) always are curious to learn more about data science and machine learning and stuff, and b) are usually overwhelmed by how much content is out there (not all of it very digestible). We hope this podcast is a part of the solution for you, but if you're looking to go farther (who isn't?) then we have a few new resources that are presenting high-quality content in a fresh, accessible way. Boring old PDFs full of inscrutable math notation, your days are numbered!
As machine learning makes its way into more and more mobile devices, an interesting question presents itself: how can we have an algorithm learn from training data that's being supplied as users interact with the algorithm? In other words, how do we do machine learning when the training dataset is distributed across many devices, imbalanced, and the usage associated with any one user needs to be obscured somewhat to protect the privacy of that user? Enter Federated Learning, a set of related alg...
Word2Vec is probably the go-to algorithm for vectorizing text data these days. Which makes sense, because it is wicked cool. Word2Vec has it all: neural networks, skip-grams and bag-of-words implementations, a multiclass classifier that gets swapped out for a binary classifier, made-up dummy words, and a model that isn't actually used to predict anything (usually). And all that's before we get to the part about how Word2Vec allows you to do algebra with text. Seriously, this stuff is cool.
It seems like every day there's more and more machine learning problems that involve learning on text data, but text itself makes for fairly lousy inputs to machine learning algorithms. That's why there are text vectorization algorithms, which re-format text data so it's ready for using for machine learning. In this episode, we'll go over some of the most common and useful ways to preprocess text data for machine learning.
This week we'll hop into the rapidly developing industry around predictive analytics for education. For many of the students who eventually drop out, data science is showing that there might be early warning signs that the student is in trouble--we'll talk about what some of those signs are, and then dig into the meatier questions around discrimination, who owns a student's data, and correlation vs. causation. Spoiler: we have more questions than we have answers on this one. Bonus appearance fro...
In our follow-up episode to last week's introduction to the first self-driving car, we will be doing a technical deep dive this week and talking about the most important systems for getting a car to drive itself 140 miles across the desert. Lidar? You betcha! Drive-by-wire? Of course! Probabilistic terrain reconstruction? Absolutely! All this and more this week on Linear Digressions.
In October 2005, 23 cars lined up in the desert for a 140 mile race. Not one of those cars had a driver. This was the DARPA grand challenge to see if anyone could build an autonomous vehicle capable of navigating a desert route (and if so, whose car could do it the fastest); the winning car, Stanley, now sits in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC as arguably the world's first real self-driving car. In this episode (part one of a two-parter), we'll revisit the DARPA grand challenge from 2005...
Figuring out what features actually matter in a model is harder to figure out than you might first guess. When a human makes a decision, you can just ask them--why did you do that? But with machine learning models, not so much. That's why we wanted to talk a bit about both regularization (again) and also other ways that you can figure out which models have the biggest impact on the predictions of your model.
It's hard to get information to and from Mars. Mars is very far away, and expensive to get to, and the bandwidth for passing messages with Earth is not huge. The messages you do pass have to traverse millions of miles, which provides ample opportunity for the message to get corrupted or scrambled. How, then, can you encode messages so that errors can be detected and corrected? How does the decoding process allow you to actually find and correct the errors? In this episode, we'll talk about three...
You may be shocked to hear this, but sometimes, people on the internet can be mean. For some of us this is just a minor annoyance, but if you're a maintainer or contributor of a large project like Wikipedia, abusive users can be a huge problem. Fighting the problem starts with understanding it, and understanding it starts with measuring it; the thing is, for a huge website like Wikipedia, there can be millions of edits and comments where abuse might happen, so measurement isn't a simple task. Th...
Advances in neural networks are moving fast enough that, even though it seems like we talk about them all the time around here, it also always seems like we're barely keeping up. So this week we have another installment in our "neural nets: they so smart!" series, talking about three topics. And all the topics this week were listener suggestions, too!
When you're estimating something about some object that's a member of a larger group of similar objects (say, the batting average of a baseball player, who belongs to a baseball team), how should you estimate it: use measurements of the individual, or get some extra information from the group? The James-Stein estimator tells you how to combine individual and group information make predictions that, taken over the whole group, are more accurate than if you treated each individual, well, individua...
Say you're looking to use some Bayesian methods to estimate parameters of a system. You've got the normalization figured out, and the likelihood, but the prior... what should you use for a prior? Empirical Bayes has an elegant answer: look to your previous experience, and use past measurements as a starting point in your prior. Scratching your head about some of those terms, and why they matter? Lucky for you, you're standing in front of a podcast episode that unpacks all of this.
Have you been out protesting lately, or watching the protests, and wondered how much effect they might have on lawmakers? It's a tricky question to answer, since usually we need randomly distributed treatments (e.g. big protests) to understand causality, but there's no reason to believe that big protests are actually randomly distributed. In other words, protest size is endogenous to legislative response, and understanding cause and effect is very challenging. So, what to do? Well, at least in t...
Remember last week, when we were talking about how great the ROC curve is for evaluating models? How things change... This week, we're exploring calibrated risk models, because that's a kind of model that seems like it would benefit from some nice ROC analysis, but in fact the ROC AUC can steer you wrong there.
