The methodology described here has broad applications, leading to new statistical tests, new type of ANOVA (analysis of variance), improved design of experiments, interesting fractional factorial designs, a better understanding of irrational numbers leading to cryptography, gaming and Fintech applications, and high quality random numbers generators (and when you really need them). It also features exact arithmetic / high performance computing and distributed algorithms to compute millions of…

Summary: The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms is just out the big news is how much more capable all the platforms have become.  Of course there are also some interesting winner and loser stories.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms is just out for 2020.  The really big news is how many excellent choices are now available.  In a remarkable move, the whole field…

In this notebook, we try to predict the positive (label 1) or negative (label 0) sentiment of the sentence. We use the UCI Sentiment Labelled Sentences Data Set.

Sentiment analysis is very useful in many areas. For example, it can be used for internet conversations moderation. Also, it is possible to predict ratings that users can assign to a certain product (food, household appliances, hotels,…

Probably the worst error is thinking there is a correlation when that correlation is purely artificial. Take a data set with 100,000 variables, say with 10 observations. Compute all the (99,999 * 100,000) / 2 cross-correlations. You are almost guaranteed to find one above 0.999. This is best illustrated in may article How to Lie with P-values (also discussing…

Fermat's last conjecture has puzzled mathematicians for 300 years, and was eventually proved only recently. In this note, I propose a generalization, that could actually lead to a much simpler proof and a more powerful result with broader applications, including to solve numerous similar equations. As usual, my research involves a significant amount of computations and experimental math, as an exploratory step before stating new conjectures, and eventually trying to prove them. The…

Hundreds of programming languages dominate the data science and statistics market: Python, R, SAS and SQL are standouts. If you're looking to branch out and add a new programming language to your skill set, which one should you learn? This one picture breaks down the differences between the four languages.…

While many of the programming libraries encapsulate the inner working details of graph and other algorithms, as a data scientist it helps a lot having a reasonably good familiarity of such details.  A solid understanding of the intuition behind such algorithms not only helps in appreciating the logic behind them but also helps in making conscious decisions about their applicability in real life cases.  There are several graph based algorithms and most notable are the shortest path…

In 2019, Google announced TensorFlow 2.0, it is a major leap from the existing TensorFlow 1.0. The key differences are as follows:

Ease of use: Many old libraries (example tf.contrib) were removed, and some consolidated. For example, in TensorFlow1.x the model could be made using Contrib, layers, Keras or estimators, so many options for the same task confused many new users. TensorFlow 2.0 promotes TensorFlow Keras for model experimentation and Estimators…

Summary:  AI/ML itself is the next big thing for many fields if you’re on the outside looking in.  But if you’re a data scientist it’s possible to see those advancements that will propel AI/ML to its next phase of utility.

“The Next Big Thing in AI/ML is…” as the lead to an article is probably the most…

Another good article by Ajit Joakar. 

Co-relation does not equal causation – is a mantra drilled into a Data Scientist from an early age

That’s fine. But very few talk of the follow-on question ..

How exactly do you determine causation?

This problem is further compounded because most books and examples are based on standard datasets (ex: Boston, Iris etc) . These examples do not discuss…

Written by Ajit Jaokar.

Firstly, there are three broad categories of algorithms:

• Supervised learning: You know how to classify the input data and the type of behavior you want to predict, but you need the algorithm to calculate it for you on new data
• Unsupervised learning: You do not know how to classify the data, and you want the algorithm to find patterns and classify the data for…

There's no doubt about it, probability and statistics is an enormous field, encompassing topics from the familiar (like the average) to the complex (regression analysis, correlation coefficients and hypothesis testing to name but a few). If you want to be a great data scientist, you have to know some basic statistics. The following picture shows which statistics topics you must know if you're going to excel in data science.…

At the time of writing, I'm a 52 year-old working in the fields of mathematics and data science. In mathematics, that makes me well-seasoned (and probably well-tenured, if I had chosen to continue in academia). In data science, some would consider me a dinosaur. In fact, many older people considering a career in data science might be put off by the thought that data science is tough to break into at a later age. But is that statement true? Should the over 50 crowd put down their textbooks…

We study the properties of a typical chaotic system to derive general insights that apply to a large class of unusual statistical distributions. The purpose is to create a unified theory of these systems. These systems can be deterministic or random, yet due to their gentle chaotic nature, they exhibit the same behavior in both cases. They lead to new models with numerous applications in Fintech, cryptography, simulation and benchmarking tests of statistical hypotheses. They are also…

Summary:  99% of our application of NLP has to do with chatbots or translation.  This is a very interesting story about expanding the bounds of NLP and feature creation to predict bestselling novels.  The authors created over 20,000 NLP features, about 2,700 of which proved to be predictive with a 90% accuracy rate in predicting NYT bestsellers.…

In this article, we explore a new type of generalized univariate normal distributions that satisfies useful statistical properties, with interesting applications. This new class of distributions is defined by its characteristic function, and applications are discussed in the last section. These distributions are semi-stable (we define what this means below). In short it is a much wider class than the stable distributions (the only stable distribution with a finite variance…

Machine learning is a hot topic in research and industry, with new methodologies developed all the time. The speed and complexity of the field makes keeping up with new techniques difficult even for experts — and potentially overwhelming for beginners.

To demystify machine learning and to offer a learning path for those who are new to the core…

This article is by Jorge Castañón, Ph.D., Senior Data Scientist at the IBM Machine Learning Hub.

Data visualization plays two key roles:

1. Communicating results clearly to a general audience.

2. …

Some original and very interesting material is presented here, with possible applications in Fintech. No need for a PhD in math to understand this article: I tried to make the presentation as simple as possible, focusing on high-level results rather than technicalities. Yet, professional statisticians and mathematicians, even academic researchers, will find some deep and fascinating results worth further exploring.…

By Bill Vorhies. 

Summary:  Here’ a proposal for real ‘zero touch’, ‘set-em-and-forget-em’ machine learning from the researchers at Amazon.  If you have an environment as fast changing as e-retail and a huge number of models matching buyers and products you could achieve real cost savings and revenue increases by making the refresh cycle faster and more accurate with automation.  This capability likely will be coming soon to your favorite AML…