There has been a massive jump in the number of covid-19 positive cases in Karnataka over the last couple of days. Today, there were 44 new cases discovered, and yesterday there were 36. This is a big jump from the average of about 15 cases per day in the preceding 4-5 days. The good news…
Statistical analysis revisited – machine learning edition
Over ten years ago, I wrote this blog post that I had termed as a “lazy post” – it was an email that I’d written to a mailing list, which I’d then copied onto the blog. It was triggered by someone on the group making an off-hand comment of “doing regression analysis”, and I had…
More on statistics and machine learning
I’m thinking of a client problem right now, and I thought that something that we need to predict can be modelled as a function of a few other things that we will know. Initially I was thinking about it from the machine learning perspective, and my thought process went “this can be modelled as a…
Statistics and machine learning approaches
A couple of years back, I was part of a team that delivered a workshop in machine learning. Given my background, I had been asked to do a half-day session on Regression, and was told that the standard software package being used was the scikit-learn package in python. Both the programming language and the package…
Podcast on election forecasting
I recorded a podcast for Pragati on opinion polls, exit polls, election forecasting and all such. You can listen to it right here, or on the podcast page here. The Pragati Podcast is available on all major podcast apps.
Medium stats
So Medium sends me this email: Congratulations! You are among the top 10% of readers and writers on Medium this year. As a small thank you, we’ve put together some highlights from your 2016. Now, I hardly use Medium. I’ve maybe written one post there (a long time ago) and read only a little bit (blogs…
Hedgehogs and foxes: Or, a day in the life of a quant
I must state at the outset that this post is inspired by the second chapter of Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise. In that chapter, which is about election forecasting, Silver draws upon the old Russian parable of the hedgehog and the fox. According to that story, the fox knows several tricks while the…
The Trouble With Analyst Reports
The only time I watch CNBC is in the morning when I’m at the gym. For reasons not known to me, my floor in office lacks televisions (every other floor has them) and the last thing I want to do when I’m home is to watch TV, that too a business channel, hence the reservation…