nextup

Elle run

mornings

Linear Digressions

Ever tried to visualize a cluster of data points in 40 dimensions?  Or even 4, for that matter?  We prefer to stick to 2, or maybe 3 if we're feeling well-caffeinated.  The t-SNE algorithm is one of the best tools on the market for doing dimensionality reduction when you have clustering in mind.

Relevant links:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVL80Gg3lA

t-SNE: Reduce Your Dimensions, Keep Your Clusters

The Medici were one of the great ruling families of Europe during the Renaissance.  How did they come to rule?  Not power, or money, or armies, but through the strength of their social network.  And speaking of great historical social networks, analysis of the network of letter-writing during the Enlightenment is helping humanities scholars track the dispersion of great ideas across the world during that time, from Voltaire to Benjamin Franklin and everyone in between.

Relevant links:
https://www2.bc.edu/~jonescq/mb851/Mar12/PadgettAnsell_AJS_1993.pdf
http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/index.html

Great Social Networks in History

Survival analysis is all about studying how long until an event occurs--it's used in marketing to study how long a customer stays with a service, in epidemiology to estimate the duration of survival of a patient with some illness, and in social science to understand how the characteristics of a war inform how long the war goes on.  This episode talks about the special challenges associated with survival analysis, and the tools that (data) scientists use to answer all kinds of duration-related questions.

Survival Analysis

First up in this episode: a crash course in natural language processing, and important steps if you want to use machine learning techniques on text data.  Then we'll take that NLP know-how and talk about a really cool analysis of State of the Union text, which analyzes the topics and word choices of every President from Washington to Obama.

Relevant link:
https://civisanalytics.com/blog/data-science/2016/01/15/data-science-on-state-of-the-union-addresses/

Text Analysis on the State Of The Union

"People with a family history of heart disease are more likely to eat healthy foods, and have a high incidence of heart attacks."  Did the healthy food cause the heart attacks?  Probably not.  But establishing causal links is extremely tricky, and extremely important to get right if you're trying to help students, test new medicines, or just optimize a website.  In this episode, we'll unpack randomized experiments, like AB tests, and maybe you'll be smarter as a result.  Will you be smarter BECAUSE of this episode?  Well, tough to say for sure...

Relevant link:
http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Experiments and Messy, Tricky Causality

This episode started out as a discussion of recommendation engines, like Netflix uses to suggest movies.  There's still a lot of that in here.  But a related topic, which is both interesting and important, is how to keep data private in the era of large-scale recommendation engines--what mistakes have been made surrounding supposedly anonymized data, how data ends up de-anonymized, and why it matters for you.

Relevant links:
http://www.netflixprize.com/
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/netflix-cancels-contest-plans-and-settles-suit/?_r=0
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/cs/pdf/0610/0610105v2.pdf

Recommendation Engines and Privacy

This week, we're doing a crash course in recurrent neural networks--what the structural pieces are that make a neural net recurrent, how that structure helps RNNs solve certain time series problems, and the importance of forgetfulness in RNNs.  

Relevant links: 
http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/

Recurrent Neural Nets

This week: everybody's favorite WWII-era classifier metric!  But it's not just for winning wars, it's a fantastic go-to metric for all your classifier quality needs.

Rock the ROC Curve

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.

Feature Processing for Text Analytics

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.

Word2Vec

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 use of parallelization, considerations of model complexity, and the computational demands of training vs. prediction, to name just a few.

Things You Learn When Building Models for Big Data

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!

KL Divergence

Neural networks are complex models with many parameters and can be prone to overfitting.  There's a surprisingly simple way to guard against this: randomly destroy connections between hidden units, also known as dropout.  It seems counterintuitive that undermining the structural integrity of the neural net makes it robust against overfitting, but in the world of neural nets, weirdness is just how things go sometimes.

Relevant links: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/JMLRdropout.pdf

Neural Net Dropout

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.

The Kernel Trick and Support Vector Machines

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.

Debiasing Word Embeddings

If you've done image recognition or computer vision tasks with a neural network, you've probably used a convolutional neural net. This episode is all about the architecture and implementation details of convolutional networks, and the tricks that make them so good at image tasks.

Convolutional Neural Nets

A huge part of the ascent of deep learning in the last few years is related to advances in computer hardware that makes it possible to do the computational heavy lifting required to build models with thousands or even millions of tunable parameters. This week we'll pretend to be electrical engineers and talk about how modern machine learning is enabled by hardware.

CPUs, GPUs, TPUs: Hardware for Deep Learning

As machine learning models get into the hands of more and more users, there's an increasing expectation that black box isn't good enough: users want to understand why the model made a given prediction, not just what the prediction itself is. This is motivating a lot of work into feature important and model interpretability tools, and one of the most exciting new ones is based on Shapley Values from game theory. In this episode, we'll explain what Shapley Values are and how they make a cool approach to feature importance for machine learning.

Game Theory for Model Interpretability: Shapley Values

Open source software is ubiquitous throughout data science, and enables the work of nearly every data scientist in some way or another. Open source projects, however, are disproportionately maintained by a small number of individuals, some of whom are institutionally supported, but many of whom do this maintenance on a purely volunteer basis. The health of the data science ecosystem depends on the support of open source projects, on an individual and institutional level.

https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/xsrt4zs2/release/2

The Data Science Open Source Ecosystem

This is a re-release of an episode that originally ran in October 2019.

If you’re trying to manage a project that serves up analytics data for a few very distinct uses, you’d be wise to consider having custom solutions for each use case that are optimized for the needs and constraints of that use cases. You also wouldn’t be YouTube, which found themselves with this problem (gigantic data needs and several very different use cases of what they needed to do with that data) and went a different way: they built one analytics data system to serve them all. Procella, the system they built, is the topic of our episode today: by deconstructing the system, we dig into the four motivating uses of this system, the complexity they had to introduce to service all four uses simultaneously, and the impressive engineering that has to go into building something that “just works.”

Procella: YouTube's super-system for analytics data storage

A few weeks ago, we put out a call for data scientists interested in issues of race and racism, or people studying how those topics can be studied with data science methods, should get in touch to come talk to our audience about their work. This week we’re excited to bring on Todd Hendricks, Bay Area data scientist and a volunteer who reached out to tell us about his studies with the Stanford Open Policing dataset.

A Data Science Take on Open Policing Data

The data science and artificial intelligence community has made amazing strides in the past few years to algorithmically automate portions of the healthcare process. This episode looks at two computer vision algorithms, one that diagnoses diabetic retinopathy and another that classifies liver cancer, and asks the question—are patients now getting better care, and achieving better outcomes, with these algorithms in the mix? The answer isn’t no, exactly, but it’s not a resounding yes, because these algorithms interact with a very complex system (the healthcare system) and other shortcomings of that system are proving hard to automate away. Getting a faster diagnosis from an image might not be an improvement if the image is now harder to capture (because of strict data quality requirements associated with the algorithm that wouldn’t stop a human doing the same job). Likewise, an algorithm getting a prediction mostly correct might not be an overall benefit if it introduces more dramatic failures when the prediction happens to be wrong. For every data scientist whose work is deployed into some kind of product, and is being used to solve real-world problems, these papers underscore how important and difficult it is to consider all the context around those problems.

A Reality Check on AI-Driven Medical Assistants

All good things must come to an end, including this podcast. This is the last episode we plan to release, and it doesn’t cover data science—it’s mostly reminiscing, thanking our wonderful audience (that’s you!), and marveling at how this thing that started out as a side project grew into a huge part of our lives for over 5 years.

It’s been a ride, and a real pleasure and privilege to talk to you each week. Thanks, best wishes, and good night!

—Katie and Ben