What if I told you that I can show you the difference between Bayesian and Frequentist statistics with one single coin toss?

Before we go any further, the demonstration works best in video form, so don’t read the summary and spoilers below until you’ve seen it. …

“Among the machine learning strategy consultations you’ve done, which kinds of product team were the most challenging to work with?”

After consulting on hundreds of machine learning projects, I’ve learned to pay attention to early warning signs that the client is in danger of shooting themselves in the foot. …

Imagine two (human) workers:

• Chris Careless is a constant disappointment to you, performing your task well 70% of the time and producing an absolute cringe the rest of the time. Watching Chris make 10 attempts is more than enough to provoke an “oh, dear” response from you.
• Ronnie Reliable is…

It’s time to tackle a topic from psychology that’s essential for all data professionals:

How do you measure user happiness?

Let me try to guess what you’re thinking. Survey responses? Lack of complaints? Number of returns? Propensity to click?

The correct answer is…

You don’t. If you think your happiness…

This article takes you on a tour of the most popular parameters in statistics! If you’re not sure what a statistical parameter is or you’re foggy on how probability distributions work, I recommend scooting over to my beginner-friendly intro here in Part 1 before continuing here.

Note: If a concept…

Test yourself! How many of these core statistical concepts are you able to explain?

CLT, CDF, Distribution, Estimate, Expected Value, Histogram, Kurtosis, MAD, Mean, Median, MGF, Mode, Moment, Parameter, Probability, PDF, Random Variable, Random Variate, Skewness, Standard Deviation, Tails, Variance

Got some gaps in your knowledge? Read on!

Note: If…

Getting Started

The coarsest way to, ahem, classify supervised machine learning (ML) tasks is into classification versus prediction. (What’s supervised ML? See the video below if you need a refresher.)

If you’re the kind of person who likes to keep a tidy mind, here’s why your lip might curl in disgust when confronted with the title question in my recent article on the difference between classification, regression, and prediction: There is no classification.

There is no classification.

Let me explain.

Discrete versus continuous

…