Data Skeptic

Commute times and BBQ invites help frame a discussion about the statistical concept of confidence intervals.

A discussion about getting ready in the morning, negotiating a used car purchase, and selecting the best AirBnB place to stay at help frame a conversation about the decision theoretic principal known as the Value of Information equation.

In this bonus episode, guest Louis Zocchi discusses his background in the gaming industry, specifically, how he became a manufacturer of dice designed to produce statistically uniform outcomes. During the show Louis mentioned a two part video listeners might enjoy: part 1 and part 2 can both be found on youtube. Kyle mentioned a robot capable of unnoticably cheating at Rock Paper Scissors / Ro Sham Bo. More details can be found here. Louis mentioned dice collector Kevin Cook whose website is DiceCollector.com While we're on the subject of table top role playing games, Kyle recommends these two related podcasts listeners might enjoy: The Conspiracy Skeptic podcast (on which host Kyle was recently a guest) had a great episode "Dungeons and Dragons - The Devil's Game?" which explores claims of D&Ds alleged ties to skepticism. Also, Kyle swears there's a great Monster Talk episode discussing claims of a satanic connection to Dungeons and Dragons, but despite mild efforts to locate it, he came up empty. Regard

Marick Sinay from ZestFianance is our guest this weel.  This episode explores how data science techniques are applied in the financial world, specifically in assessing credit worthiness.  

Linhda and Kyle talk about Decision Tree Learning in this miniepisode.  Decision Tree Learning is the algorithmic process of trying to generate an optimal decision tree to properly classify or forecast some future unlabeled element based by following each step in the tree.

Our guest this week is Hamilton physics professor Kate Jones-Smith who joins us to discuss the evidence for the claim that drip paintings of Jackson Pollock contain fractal patterns. This hypothesis originates in a paper by Taylor, Micolich, and Jonas titled Fractal analysis of Pollock's drip paintings which appeared in Nature. Kate and co-author Harsh Mathur wrote a paper titled Revisiting Pollock's Drip Paintings which also appeared in Nature. A full text PDF can be found here, but lacks the helpful figures which can be found here, although two images are blurred behind a paywall. Their paper was covered in the New York Times as well as in USA Today (albeit with with a much more delightful headline: Never mind the Pollock's [sic]). While discussing the intersection of science and art, the conversation also touched briefly on a few other intersting topics. For example, Penrose Tiles appearing in islamic art (pre-dating Roger Penrose's investigation of the interesting properties of these tiling processes), Qu

Our topic for this week is "noise" as in signal vs. noise.  This is not a signal processing discussions, but rather a brief introduction to how the work noise is used to describe how much information in a dataset is useless (as opposed to useful). Also, Kyle announces having recently had the pleasure of appearing as a guest on The Conspiracy Skeptic Podcast to discussion The Bible Code.  Please check out this other fine program for this and it's many other great episodes.

Our guest this week is Susan Gerbic. Susan is a skeptical activist involved in many activities, the one we focus on most in this episode is Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia, an organization working to improve the content and citations of Wikipedia. During the episode, Kyle recommended Susan's talk a The Amazing Meeting 9 which can be found here. Some noteworthy topics mentioned during the podcast were Neil deGrasse Tyson's endorsement of the Penny for NASA project. As well as the Web of Trust and Rebutr browser plug ins, as well as how following the Skeptic Action project on Twitter provides recommendations of sites to visit and rate as you see fit via these tools. For her benevolent reference, Susan suggested The Odds Must Be Crazy, a fun website that explores the statistical likelihoods of seemingly unlikely situations. For all else, Susan and her various activities can be found via SusanGerbic.com.

In this week's mini episode, Linhda and Kyle discuss Ant Colony Optimization - a numerical / stochastic optimization technique which models its search after the process ants employ in using random walks to find a goal (food) and then leaving a pheremone trail in their walk back to the nest.  We even find some way of relating the city of San Francisco and running a restaurant into the discussion.

Our guest this week is Shahid Shah. Shahid is CEO at Netspective, and writes three blogs: Health Care Guy, Shahid Shah, and HitSphere - the Healthcare IT Supersite. During the program, Kyle recommended a talk from the 2014 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium entitled Transforming "Digital Silos" to "Digital Care Enterprise" which was hosted by our guest Shahid Shah. In addition to his work in Healthcare IT, he also the chairperson for Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance, an non-profit organization that, amongst other activities, is hosting an upcoming conference. The 3rd annual OSEHRA Open Source Summit: Global Collaboration in Healthcare IT , which will be taking place September 3-5, 2014 in Washington DC. For our benevolent recommendation, Shahid suggested listeners may benefit from taking the time to read books on leadership for the insights they provide. For our self-serving recommendation, Shahid recommended listeners check out his company Netspective , if you are working with a company looking for

This miniepisode discusses the technique called Cross Validation - a process by which one randomly divides up a dataset into numerous small partitions. Next, (typically) one is held out, and the rest are used to train some model. The hold out set can then be used to validate how good the model does at describing/predicting new data.

This episode features a discussion with statistics PhD student Zach Seeskin about a project he was involved in as part of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowship.  The project involved exploring the relationship (if any) between streetlight outages and crime in the City of Chicago.  We discuss how the data was accessed via the City of Chicago data portal, how the analysis was done, and what correlations were discovered in the data.  Won't you listen and hear what ws found? 

This episode loosely explores the topic of Experimental Design including hypothesis testing, the importance of statistical tests, and an everyday and business example.

In this week's episode, we discuss applied solutions to big data problem with big data engineer Jay Shankar.  The episode explores approaches and design philosophy to solving real world big data business problems, and the exploration of the wide array of tools available.  

In this minisode, we discuss Bayesian Updating - the process by which one can calculate the most likely hypothesis might be true given one's older / prior belief and all new evidence.

In the second full length episode of the podcast, we discuss the current state of personalized medicine and the advancements in genetics that have made it possible.

In this mini, we discuss p-values and their use in hypothesis testing, in the context of an hypothetical experiment on plant flowering, and end with a reference to the Particle Fever documentary and how statistical significance played a role.

A conversation with Convertro's Nathan Janos about methodologies used to help advertisers understand the affect each of their marketing efforts (print, SEM, display, skywriting, etc.) contributes to their overall return.

In this first mini-episode of the Data Skeptic Podcast, we define and discuss type i and type ii errors (a.k.a. false positives and false negatives).

The Data Skeptic Podcast features conversations with 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. This first episode is a short discussion about what this podcast is all about.