udacity

A true classic topic in ML: Facial recognition is very high-dimensional, meaning that each picture can have millions of pixels, each of which can be a single feature. It's computationally expensive to deal with all these features, and invites overfitting problems. PCA (principal components analysis) is a classic dimensionality reduction tool that compresses these many dimensions into the few that contain the most variation in the data, and those principal components are often then fed into a classic ML algorithm like and SVM. 

One of the best thing about eigenfaces is the great example code that you can find in sklearn--you can distinguish pictures of world leaders yourself in just a few minutes!

http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/applications/face_recognition.html

Facial Recognition with Eigenfaces

Now that we know about eigenfaces (if you don't, listen to the previous episode), let's talk about how it breaks down. 

Variations that are trivial to humans when identifying faces can really mess up computer-driven facial ID--expressions, lighting, and angle are a few. Something that can easily happen is an algorithm can optimize to identify one of those traits, rather than the underlying trait of whether the person is the same (for example, if the training image is me smiling, you may reject an image of me frowning but accidentally approve an image of another woman smiling). 

Fisherfaces uses a fisher linear discriminant to distinguish based on the dimension in the data that shows the smallest inter-class distance, rather than maximizing the variation overall (we'll unpack this statement), and it is much more robust than our pal eigenfaces when there's shadows, cut-off images, expressions, etc.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~belhumeur/journal/fisherface-pami97.pdf

Better Facial Recognition with Fisherfaces

So, um... what about machine learning for audio applications?  In the course of starting this podcast, we've edited out a lot of "um"'s from our raw audio files.  It's gotten now to the point that, when we see the waveform in soundstudio, we can almost identify an "um" by eye.  Which makes it an interesting problem for machine learning--is there a way we can train an algorithm to recognize the "um" pattern, too?  This has become a little side project for Katie, which is very much still a work in progress.  We'll talk about what's been accomplished so far, some design choices Katie made in getting the project off the ground, and (of course) mistakes made and hopefully corrected.  We always say that the best way to learn something is by doing it, and this is our chance to try our own machine learning project instead of just telling you about what someone else did! 

Um Detector 1

Supervised classification is built on the backs of labeled datasets, but a good set of labels can be hard to find.  Great data is everywhere, but the corresponding labels can sometimes be really tricky.  Take a few examples we've already covered, like lie detection with an MRI machine (have to take pictures of someone's brain while they try to lie, not a trivial task) or automated image captioning (so many images!  so many valid labels!)  

In this epsiode, we'll dig into this topic in depth, talking about some of the standard ways to get a labeled dataset if your project requires labels and you don't already have them.

www.higgshunters.org

Labels and Where To Find Them

Often machine learning discussions center around algorithms, or features, or datasets--this one centers around interpretation, and ethics. 

Suppose you could use a technology like fMRI to see what regions of a person's brain are active when they ask questions. And also suppose that you could run trials where you watch their brain activity while they lie about some minor issue (say, whether the card in their hand is a spade or a club)--could you use machine learning to analyze those images, and use the patterns in them for lie detection? Well you certainly can try, and indeed researchers have done just that. 

There are important problems though--the images of brains can be high variance, meaning that for any given person, there might not be a lot of certainty about whether they're lying or not. It's also open to debate whether the training set (in this case, test subjects with playing cards in their hands) really generalize well to the more important cases, like a person accused of a crime. 

So while machine learning has yielded some impressive gains in lie detection, it is not a solution to these thornier scientific issues.

http://www.amacad.org/pdfs/deceit.pdf

Lie Detectors

After the Challenger exploded in 1986, killing all 7 astronauts aboard, an investigation into the cause was immediately launched. 

In the cold temperatures the night before the launch, the o-rings that seal off the fuel tanks from the rocket boosters became inflexible, so they did not seal properly, which led to the fuel tank explosion. NASA knew that there could be o-ring problems, but performed the analysis of their data incorrectly and ended up massively underestimating the risk associated with the cold temperatures. 

In this episode, we'll unpack the mistakes they made. We'll talk about how they excluded data points that they thought were irrelevant but which actually were critical to recognizing a fatal pattern.

Statistical Mistakes and the Challenger Disaster

This is a re-release of an episode that originally aired on April 1, 2018

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 Networks

A message from Ben around algorithmic bias, and how our models are sometimes reflections of ourselves.

An interstitial word from Ben

As protests sweep across the United States in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, we take a moment to dig into one of the ways that data science perpetuates and amplifies racism in the American criminal justice system. COMPAS is an algorithm that claims to give a prediction about the likelihood of an offender to re-offend if released, based on the attributes of the individual, and guess what: it shows disparities in the predictions for black and white offenders that would nudge judges toward giving harsher sentences to black individuals. 

We dig into this algorithm a little more deeply, unpacking how different metrics give different pictures into the “fairness” of the predictions and what is causing its racially disparate output (to wit: race is explicitly not an input to the algorithm, and yet the algorithm gives outputs that correlate with race—what gives?) Unfortunately it’s not an open-and-shut case of a tuning parameter being off, or the wrong metric being used: instead the biases in the justice system itself are being captured in the algorithm outputs, in such a way that a self-fulfilling prophecy of harsher treatment for black defendants is all but guaranteed. Like many other things this week, this episode left us thinking about bigger, systemic issues, and why it’s proven so hard for years to fix what’s broken.

Racism, the criminal justice system, and data science

This episode features Zach Drake, a working data scientist and PhD candidate in the Criminology, Law and Society program at George Mason University. Zach specializes in bringing data science methods to studies of criminal behavior, and got in touch after our last episode (about racially complicated recidivism algorithms). Our conversation covers a wide range of topics—common misconceptions around race and crime statistics, how methodologically-driven criminology scholars think about building crime prediction models, and how to think about policy changes when we don’t have a complete understanding of cause and effect in criminology. For the many of us currently re-thinking race and criminal justice, but wanting to be data-driven about it, this conversation with Zach is a must-listen.

Criminology and Data Science

This is a re-release of an episode that first ran on January 29, 2017.

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

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

Statistical Mistakes and the Challenger Disaster

Linear Digressions

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