Data Skeptic

Today on the show Derek Driggs, a PhD Student at the University of Cambridge. He comes on to discuss the work Common Pitfalls and Recommendations for Using Machine Learning to Detect and Prognosticate for COVID-19 Using Chest Radiographs and CT Scans.

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Direct download: pandemic-machine-learning-pitfalls.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:00am PDT

Given a document in English, how can you estimate the ease with which someone will find they can read it?  Does it require a college-level of reading comprehension or is it something a much younger student could read and understand?

While these questions are useful to ask, they don't admit a simple answer.  One option is to use one of the (essentially identical) two Flesch Kincaid Readability Tests.  These are simple calculations which provide you with a rough estimate of the reading ease.

In this episode, Kyle shares his thoughts on this tool and when it could be appropriate to use as part of your feature engineering pipeline towards a machine learning objective.

For empirical validation of these metrics, the plot below compares English language Wikipedia pages with "Simple English" Wikipedia pages.  The analysis Kyle describes in this episode yields the intuitively pleasing histogram below.  It summarizes the distribution of Flesch reading ease scores for 1000 pages examined from both Wikipedias.

 

Direct download: flesch-kincaid-readability-tests.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 12:50am PDT

Today on the show we have Shubhranshu Shekar, a Ph. D Student at Carnegie Mellon University, who joins us to talk about his work, FAIROD: Fairness-aware Outlier Detection.

Direct download: fairness-aware-outlier-detection.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:30am PDT

Today on the show Dr. Anders Sandburg, Senior Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, comes on to share his work “The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggest Intelligent Life is Rare.”

Works Mentioned:

Paper:
The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggest Intelligent Life is Rare.”by Andrew E Snyder-Beattie, Anders Sandberg, K Eric Drexler, Michael B Bonsall 

Twitter:
@anderssandburg

Direct download: life-may-be-rare.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 7:24am PDT

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