Viewing profile — selectron

It is a legitimate question.

How much better?

This is a great point about making sensible assumptions. Too often I see evidence that people think that data analysis should be devoid of assumptions, and any assumptions complete…

Why should we expect there isn't a correlation? They do mention it in their analysis. At the end of the day, just because there might be a systematic bias in your result doesn't me…

It is always easy to criticize a data-driven analysis by saying its assumptions could be wrong. In the real world, all analysis is based on assumptions, some of which you can alway…

The main thing I want from job descriptions is a salary range. The fact that companies don't post salaries is a strong counter-point to how companies complain about how hard it is …

The problem is that the term data analyst has come to mean data reporter. Similarly "business analyst" generally involves tasks that are best solved in Excel. The "science" in data…

You don't have to be productive all the time. It is important to have some time to relax and have fun. There are far worse things you could be doing than playing too many video gam…

> Taking papers at face value is really only a problem in science reporting and at (very) sub-par institutions/venues. > WRT the former, science reporters often grossly misundersta…

The explanation glosses over a few important details. Gradient boosting works by adding some small weight to the instances the model is incorrectly predicting. The amount of extra …

Feature engineering and model ensembling are usually what separates the top competitors.

Hand counting of votes seems like a no-brainer, regardless of whether there was a conspiracy this election.

This statement is too general. You could of said the same thing about chess, there are chess Grandmasters who devote their lives to studying the game yet computers play chess at a …

I would say that table is really quite valuable. Kaggle problems come from all types of companies, so it doesn't make sense to say that it is "overfitted patterns that he's adopted…

For image competitions you are right. Neural networks are often in winning teams ensembles, but they require a lot more work than something like xgboost (gradient-boosted decision …

1) It depends heavily on the model. Something like xgboost (gradient boosted decision tree) will handle irrelevant features fairly well, while other models (like linear models, esp…

There is no way machine learning will be a necessary skill for software engineering, if that is your motivation I would not spend time learning it. However, if you still want to le…

My advice is Python, but it depends on what your background is and what you want to do. If this is your first language and you have a stats background, R is a solid choice. If you …

Interesting. After watching the show Billions, and reading up on how much money hedge fund managers make on fees (seems totally ridiculous), I wonder how common is illegal insider …

To really understand if companies are biased or not, you also need to know the percent of applicants to these companies who are black. If only 2% of applicants to Google are black,…

I agree completely. I also think there is way more luck involved than people want to admit - a lot interesting results are unexpected, and there are so few jobs the timing has to w…

Sorry I wasn't clear - the attitude of going into industry being seen as a failure is common, especially among older professors. This attitude is changing somewhat, but is still de…

If you just want ROI, you are better off spending your money elsewhere. This is evidenced by the lack of money most companies put into scientific research. Further the gains of sci…

The problem is that there are plenty of graduate students willing to work for peanuts.

The goal of research (at least for basic science) isn't to make money, it is to increase knowledge about the universe. This knowledge is a public good, so it makes sense that priva…