Word of the Week – Incidence versus Prevalence
Epidemiological terms are top of mind now, due to the pandemic. Here are two that often confuse: incidence and prevalence. For example, I encountered the following sentence on a popular medical web...
View ArticleJuly 22: Odds and Betting
This week we look at odds and betting; our course spotlights are July 23 -Aug 20: SQL – Responsible Data ScienceJuly 30 -Aug 27: SQL – Biostatistics 1 – For Medical Science and Public Health See you...
View ArticleAI Success, But Not Business Success
In their book, “Mining Your Own Business,” Jeff Deal and Gerhard Pilcher, COO and CEO of Elder Research respectively, describe what I’ll call “The Case of the Climbing Churn.” Churn is when a...
View ArticleWord of the Week – Label Spreading
A common problem in machine learning is the “rare case” situation. In many classification problems, the class of interest (fraud, purchase by a web visitor, death of a patient) is rare enough that a...
View ArticleBook Review – Noise
Who would have thought that an entire book devoted to the bias-variance tradeoff would make it to the NY Times business best seller list? The book is the recently-published Noise, by Daniel Kahneman,...
View ArticleAug 5: AI success does not always lead to business success
This week we look at several case studies where success on the AI front was not sufficient to assure longer term business success. Our course spotlight is on: Aug 20 – Sep 17: Introduction to Design...
View ArticleWord of the Week – Drift
In deployed machine learning pipelines, “drift” is changes in the model environment that cause the model performance to degrade over time. Drift might result from data quality changes. For example,...
View ArticleData Literacy – The Chainsaw Case
A famous business school case by Harvard Professor Michael Porter on forecasting chainsaw sales dramatically illustrated the limits of statistical models when common business sense and clear-eyed...
View ArticleOct 19: Data Literacy – The Chainsaw Case
“In the age of Big Data we often believe that our predictions about the future are better than ever before. But …in the real world, we often get better results by using simple rules and considering...
View ArticleOct 6: Ethical AI: Darth Vader and the Cowardly Lion
Can we trust anything we see? Or hear? Last week saw the news that James Earl Jones was retiring from his role voicing Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, and farming it out to AI. Brief musings...
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