You may not realize it consciously, but beautiful visualizations have rules. The rules are often implict and manifest themselves as expectations about how the data is summarized, presented, and annotated so you can quickly extract the information in the underlying data using just visual cues. It’s a bit abstract but very profound, and these principles underlie the ggplot2 package in R that makes famously beautiful plots with minimal code. This episode covers a paper by Hadley Wickham (author of ggplot2, among other R packages) that unpacks the layered approach to graphics taken in ggplot2, and makes clear the assumptions and structure of many familiar data visualizations.

It’s pretty common to fit a function to a dataset when you’re a data scientist. But in many cases, it’s not clear what kind of function might be most appropriate—linear? quadratic? sinusoidal? some combination of these, and perhaps others? Gaussian processes introduce a nonparameteric option where you can fit over all the possible types of functions, using the data points in your datasets as constraints on the results that you get (the idea being that, no matter what the “true” underlying function is, it produced the data points you’re trying to fit). What this means is a very flexible, but depending on your parameters not-too-flexible, way to fit complex datasets.

The math underlying GPs gets complex, and the links below contain some excellent visualizations that help make the underlying concepts clearer. Check them out!

Relevant links:

http://katbailey.github.io/post/gaussian-processes-for-dummies/

https://thegradient.pub/gaussian-process-not-quite-for-dummies/

https://distill.pub/2019/visual-exploration-gaussian-processes/

The abundance of data in healthcare, and the value we could capture from structuring and analyzing that data, is a huge opportunity. It also presents huge challenges. One of the biggest challenges is how, exactly, to do that structuring and analysis—data scientists working with this data have hundreds or thousands of small, and sometimes large, decisions to make in their day-to-day analysis work. What data should they include in their studies? What method should they use to analyze it? What hyperparameter settings should they explore, and how should they pick a value for their hyperparameters? The thing that’s really difficult here is that, depending on which path they choose among many reasonable options, a data scientist can get really different answers to the underlying question, which makes you wonder how to conclude anything with certainty at all.

The paper for this week’s episode performs a systematic study of many, many different permutations of the questions above on a set of benchmark datasets where the “right” answers are known. Which strategies are most likely to yield the “right” answers? That’s the whole topic of discussion.

Relevant links:

https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/fxz7kr65

AI is evolving incredibly quickly, and thinking now about where it might go next (and how we as a species and a society should be prepared) is critical. Professor Stuart Russell, an AI expert at UC Berkeley, has a formulation for modifications to AI that we should study and try implementing now to keep it much safer in the long run. Prof. Russell’s new book, “Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control” gives an accessible but deeply thoughtful exploration of why he thinks runaway AI is something we need to be considering seriously now, and what changes in formulation might be a solution. This episodes features Prof. Russell as a special guest, exploring the topics in his book and giving more perspective on the long-term possible futures of AI: both good and bad.

Relevant links:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/566677/human-compatible-by-stuart-russell/

Most data scientists bounce back and forth regularly between doing analysis in databases using SQL and building and deploying machine learning pipelines in R or python. But if we think ahead a few years, a few visionary researchers are starting to see a world in which the ML pipelines can actually be deployed inside the database. Why? One strong advantage for databases is they have built-in features for data governance, including things like permissioning access and tracking the provenance of data. Adding machine learning as another thing you can do in a database means that, potentially, these enterprise-grade features will be available for ML models too, which will make them much more widely accepted across enterprises with tight IT policies. The papers this week articulate the gap between enterprise needs and current ML infrastructure, how ML in a database could be a way to knit the two closer together, and a proof-of-concept that ML in a database can actually work.

Relevant links:

https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/02/19/ten-year-egml-predictions/

https://blog.acolyer.org/2020/02/21/extending-relational-query-processing/

Many of us have the privilege of working from home right now, in an effort to keep ourselves and our family safe and slow the transmission of covid-19. But working from home is an adjustment for many of us, and can hold some challenges compared to coming in to the office every day. This episode explores this a little bit, informally, as we compare our new work-from-home setups and reflect on what’s working well and what we’re finding challenging.

Covid-19 is turning the world upside down right now. One thing that’s extremely important to understand, in order to fight it as effectively as possible, is how the virus spreads and especially how much of the spread of the disease comes from carriers who are experiencing no or mild symptoms but are contagious anyway. This episode digs into the epidemiological model that was published in Science this week—this model finds that the data suggests that the majority of carriers of the coronavirus, 80-90%, do not have a detected disease. This has big implications for the importance of social distancing of a way to get the pandemic under control and explains why a more comprehensive testing program is critical for the United States.

Also, in lighter news, Katie (a native of Dayton, Ohio) lays a data-driven claim for just declaring the University of Dayton flyers to be the 2020 NCAA College Basketball champions.

Relevant links:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/science.abb3221

This week’s episode is a re-release of a recent episode, which we don’t usually do but it seems important for understanding what we can all do to slow the spread of covid-19. In brief, public health measures for infectious diseases get most of their effectiveness from their widespread adoption: most of the protection you get from a vaccine, for example, comes from all the other people who also got the vaccine.

That’s why measures like social distancing are so important right now: even if you’re not in a high-risk group for covid-19, you should still stay home and avoid in-person socializing because your good behavior lowers the risk for those who are in high-risk groups. If we all take these kinds of measures, the risk lowers dramatically. So stay home, work remotely if you can, avoid physical contact with others, and do your part to manage this crisis. We’re all in this together.

When you need to untangle cause and effect, but you can’t run an experiment, it’s time to get creative. This episode covers difference in differences and synthetic controls, two observational causal inference techniques that researchers have used to understand causality in complex real-world situations.

This is a re-release of an episode that originally ran on October 21, 2018.

The Poisson distribution is a probability distribution function used to for events that happen in time or space. It’s super handy because it’s pretty simple to use and is applicable for tons of things—there are a lot of interesting processes that boil down to “events that happen in time or space.” This episode is a quick introduction to the distribution, and then a focus on two of our favorite everyday applications: using the Poisson distribution to identify supernovas and study army deaths from horse kicks.