Communicating binary forecasts

One silver lining in the madness of the US Presidential election counting is that there are some interesting analyses floating around regarding polling and surveying and probabilities and visualisation. Take this post from Andrew Gelman’s blog, for example: Suppose our forecast in a certain state is that candidate X will win 0.52 of the two-party…

Covid-19 Prevalence in Karnataka

Finally, many months after other Indian states had conducted a similar exercise, Karnataka released the results of its first “covid-19 sero survey” earlier this week. The headline number being put out is that about 27% of the state has already suffered from the infection, and has antibodies to show for it. From the press release:…

Simulating Covid-19 Scenarios

I must warn that this is a super long post. Also I wonder if I should put this on medium in order to get more footage. Most models of disease spread use what is known as a “SIR” framework. This Numberphile video gives a good primer into this framework. The problem with the framework is…

Big Data and Fast Frugal Trees

In his excellent podcast episode with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts, psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer introduces the concept of “fast and frugal trees“. When someone needs to make decisions quickly, Gigerenzer says, they don’t take into account a large number of factors, but instead rely on a small set of thumb rules. The podcast itself is based on…

Segmentation and machine learning

For best results, use machine learning to do customer segmentation, but then get humans with domain knowledge to validate the segments There are two common ways in which people do customer segmentation. The “traditional” method is to manually define the axes through which the customers will get segmented, and then simply look through the data…

Taking Intelligence For Granted

There was a point in time when the use of artificial intelligence or machine learning or any other kind of intelligence in a product was a source of competitive advantage and differentiation. Nowadays, however, many people have got so spoiled by the use of intelligence in many products they use that it has become more…

Data, football and astrology

Jonathan Wilson has an amusing article on data and football, and how many data-oriented managers in football have also been incredibly superstitious. This is in response to BT Sport’s (one of the UK broadcasters of the Premier League) announcement of it’s “Unscripted” promotion where “some of the world’s foremost experts in both sports and artificial intelligence…