Jo Hardin joins us this week to discuss the ASA's Election Prediction Contest. This is a competition aimed at forecasting the results of the upcoming US presidential election competition. More details are available in Jo's blog post found here.

You can find some useful R code for getting started automatically gathering data from 538 via Jo's github and official contest details are available here. During the interview we also mention Daily Kos and 538.

The F1 score is a model diagnostic that combines precision and recall to provide a singular evaluation for model comparison.  In this episode we discuss how it applies to selecting an interior designer.

Urban congestion effects every person living in a city of any reasonable size. Lewis Lehe joins us in this episode to share his work on downtown congestion pricing. We explore topics of how different pricing mechanisms effect congestion as well as how data visualization can inform choices.

You can find examples of Lewis's work at setosa.io. His paper which we discussed during the interview isDistance-dependent congestion pricing for downtown zones.

On this episode, we discuss State of California data which can be found at pems.dot.ca.gov.

Heteroskedasticity is a term used to describe a relationship between two variables which has unequal variance over the range.  For example, the variance in the length of a cat's tail almost certainly changes (grows) with age.  On the other hand, the average amount of chewing gum a person consume probably has a consistent variance over a wide range of human heights.

We also discuss some issues with the visualization shown in the tweet embedded below.

Our guest today is Michael Cuthbert, an associate professor of music at MIT and principal investigator of the Music21 project, which we focus our discussion on today.

Music21 is a python library making analysis of music accessible and fun. It supports integration with popular formats such as MIDI, MusicXML, Lilypond, and others. It's also well integrated with The Elvis Project, enabling users to import large volumes of music for easy analysis. Music21 is a great platform for musicologists and machine learning researchers alike to explore patterns and structure in music.