# Posts Tagged ‘ probability ’

## Christopher Salahub on Markov Chains – The Central Equilibrium – Episode 2

It was a great pleasure to talk to Christopher Salahub about Markov chains in the second episode of my new talk show, The Central Equilibrium!  Chris graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics degree in statistics.  He just finished an internship in data development at Environics Analytics, and he is starting […]

## Dragon Trainer rich mathematical task

July 20, 2017
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I love rich mathematical tasks. Here is one for all levels of schooling. What do you think? Background to rich tasks A rich task is an open-ended task that students can engage with at multiple levels. I use the following … Continue reading →

## MCMC as a Stream

April 1, 2017
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Introduction This weekend I’ve been preparing some material for my upcoming Scala for statistical computing short course. As part of the course, I thought it would be useful to walk through how to think about and structure MCMC codes, and in particular, how to think about MCMC algorithms as infinite streams of state. This material … Continue reading MCMC as a Stream

## Weapons of Math Destruction – A Data Scientist’s Guide to Disarmament

September 11, 2016
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I’ve had this book on pre-order since spring and it finally arrived on Friday. I subsequently devoured it over the weekend. The book lays out a clear and compelling case for how data-driven algorithms can become — in contrast to their promise of amoral objectivism — efficient means for reproducing and even exacerbating social inequalities […]

## That’s like so random! Monte Carlo for Data Science

July 14, 2016
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Another great turnout at the DataPhilly meetup last night. Was great to see all you random data nerds! Code snippets to generate animated examples here.

## Bonferroni, les anniversaires et les terroristes (ou pas)

March 10, 2016
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Le paradoxe des anniversaires est un exercice de probabilité que l’on découvre assez vite. Mais assez souvent, on l’oublie, alors qu’il est en réalité assez profond. Le problème est le suivant: quel est le nombre de personnes qu’il faut réunir pour avoir (au moins) une chance sur 2 pour que deux personnes aient leur anniversaire le même jour. Si on calcule la probabilité que deux personnes dans un groupe de…

## Speaking at DataPhilly February 2016

February 5, 2016
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The next DataPhilly meetup will feature a medley of machine-learning talks, including an Intro to ML from yours truly. Check out the speakers list and be sure to RSVP. Hope to see you there! Thursday, February 18, 2016 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM Speakers: Corey Chivers Randy Olson Austin Rochford Corey Chivers (Penn Medicine) Abstract: […]

## Simple Distributions for Mixtures?

February 3, 2016
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The idea of GLMs is that given some covariates,  has a distribution in the exponential family (Gaussian, Poisson, Gamma, etc). But that does not mean that  has a similar distribution… so there is no reason to test for a Gamma model for  before running a Gamma regression, for instance. But are there cases where it might work? That the non-conditional distribution is the same (same family at least) than the conditional ones? For…

## The normal distribution – three tricky bits

January 18, 2016
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There are several tricky things about teaching and understanding the normal distribution, and in this post I’m going to talk about three of them. They are the idea of a model, the limitations of the normal distribution, and the idea … Continue reading →

## Collectionner les Figurines Lego avec ses Ami(e)s

January 14, 2016
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Dans mon précédant billet, je regardais combien de figurines Lego je devais acheter pour avoir toute la série, avec ma fille. Pour la série de 16, il fallait, en moyenne, acheter 54 sachets, à 3 euros pièces. Dans les commentaires, @Guillaume et @Gaelle me faisaient noter que les échanges, ça pouvait aider. Bon, tout d’abord j’aime pas qu’on donne des conseils à mes filles pour avoir raison contre moi !…