Re-Release: Fighting Cholera with Data, 1854

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 tracing the geography of all the deaths from the outbreak, Snow was practicing elementary data science--and stumbled upon one of history’s most famous outliers.

In this episode, we’ll tell you more about this single data point, a case of cholera that cracked the case wide open for Snow and provided critical validation for the germ theory of disease.

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Re-release: The Enron Dataset

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 top executives were made public; there's no realistic chance any dataset like this will ever be made public again.

But the dataset that was released has gone on to immortality, serving as the basis for a huge variety of advances in machine learning and other fields.

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Anscombe's Quartet

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 an example of how summary statistics can be misleading, but today we can even do one better: the Datasaurus Dozen is a set of twelve datasets, all extremely visually distinct, that have the same summary stats as a source dataset that, there's no other way to put this, looks like a dinosaur.  It's an example of how datasets can be generated to look like almost anything while still preserving arbitrary summary statistics.  In other words, Anscombe's Quartets can be generated at-will and we all should be reminded to visualize our data (not just compute summary statistics) if we want to claim to really understand it.

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Re-release: Traffic Metering Algorithms

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 also super awesome).

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PageRank

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.

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Things You Learn When Building Models for Big Data

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.  

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How to Find New Things to Learn

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!

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Federated Learning

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 algorithms from Google that are designed to help out in exactly this scenario.  If you've used keyboard shortcuts or autocomplete on an Android phone, chances are you've encountered Federated Learning even if you didn't know it.

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Word2Vec

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.

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Feature Processing for Text Analytics

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.

Education Analytics

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 from Maeby the dog, who is pictured below (on her way home from the orphanage when she got adopted).

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A Technical Deep Dive on Stanley, the First Self-Driving Car

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.

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An Introduction to Stanley, the First Self-Driving Car

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 and the rules and constraints of what it took for Stanley to win the competition.  Next week, we'll do a deep dive into Stanley's control systems and overall operation and what the key systems were that allowed Stanley to win the race.

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Feature Importance

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.

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Space Codes!

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 pieces of the process (Reed-Solomon codes, convolutional codes, and Viterbi decoding) that allow the scientists at NASA to talk to our rovers on Mars.

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Finding (and Studying) Wikipedia Trolls

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.  That's where machine learning comes in: by building an "abuse classifier," and pointing it at the Wikipedia edit corpus, researchers at Jigsaw and the Wikimedia foundation are for the first time able to estimate abuse rates and curate a dataset of abusive incidents.  Then those researchers, and others, can use that dataset to study the pathologies and effects of Wikipedia trolls.

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A Sprint Through What's New in Neural Nets

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!

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Stein's Paradox

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, individually.  

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