Win-Vector Blog

Introduction

To implement many numeric simulations you need a sophisticated source of instances of random variables. The question is: how do you generate them?

The literature is full of algorithms requiring random samples as inputs or drivers (conditional random fields, Bayesian network models, particle filters and so on). The literature is also full of competing methods (pseudorandom generators, entropy sources, Gibbs samplers, Metropolis–Hastings algorithm, Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, bootstrap methods and so on). Our thesis is: this diversity is supported by only a few fundamental methods. And you are much better off thinking in terms of a few deliberately simple composable mechanisms than you would be in relying on some hugely complicated black box “brand name” technique.

We will discuss the half dozen basic methods that all of these techniques are derived from. Read more…

A constant problem for computer science (since its inception) is how to manipulate data that is larger than machine memory. We present here some general strategies for working “out of core” or what you should do when you run out of memory.

Early computers were most limited by their paltry memory sizes. von Neumann himself commented that even a room full of genius mathematicians would not be capable of much if all they could communicate, think upon or remember were the characters on a single type written page (much more memory than the few hundred words available to the Eniac). The most visible portions of early computers are their external memories or secondary stores: card readers, paper tape readers and tape drives.

SDC 920 computer, Computer History Museum, Mountain View CA

Historically computer scientists have concentrated on streaming or online algorithms (that is algorithms that work with the data in the order it is available and use limited memory). For many problems we have found this an insufficient model and it is much better to assume you can re-order and replicate data (such as scattering data to many processors and re-collecting it to sort). The scatter/gather paradigm is ubiquitous and is the underpinning of large scale sorting, databases and Map Reduce. So in one sense databases and Map Reduce different APIs on top of very related technologies (journaling, splitting and merging). Replicating data (or even delaying duplicate elimination) that is already “too large to handle” may seem counterintuitive; but it is exploiting the primary property of secondary storage: that secondary storage tends to be much larger than primary storage (typically by 2 orders of magnitude, compare a 2 terabyte drive to an 8 gigabyte memory stick). Read more…

The important criterion for a graph is not simply how fast we can see a result; rather it is whether through the use of the graph we can see something that would have been harder to see otherwise or that could not have been seen at all.

– William Cleveland, The Elements of Graphing Data, Chapter 2

In this article, I will discuss some graphs that I find extremely useful in my day-to-day work as a data scientist. While all of them are helpful (to me) for statistical visualization during the analysis process, not all of them will necessarily be useful for presentation of final results, especially to non-technical audiences.

I tend to follow Cleveland’s philosophy, quoted above; these graphs show me — and hopefully you — aspects of data and models that I might not otherwise see. Some of them, however, are non-standard, and tend to require explanation. My purpose here is to share with our readers some ideas for graphical analysis that are either useful to you directly, or will give you some ideas of your own.

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We share our admiration for a set of results called “locality sensitive hashing” by demonstrating a greatly simplified example that exhibits the spirit of the techniques. Read more…

We give a simple explanation of the interrelated machine learning techniques called kernel methods and support vector machines. We hope to characterize and de-mystify some of the properties of these methods. To do this we work some examples and draw a few analogies. The familiar no matter how wonderful is not perceived as mystical. Read more…

Nina Zumel recently gave a very clear explanation of logistic regression ( The Simpler Derivation of Logistic Regression ). In particular she called out the central role of log-odds ratios and demonstrated how the “deviance” (that mysterious
quantity reported by fitting packages) is both a term in “the pseudo-R^2″ (so directly measures goodness of fit) and is the quantity that is actually optimized during the fitting procedure. One great point of the writeup was how simple everything is once you start thinking in terms of derivatives (and that it isn’t so much the functional form of the sigmoid that is special but its relation to its own derivative that is special).

We adapt these presentation ideas to make explicit the well known equivalence of logistic regression and maximum entropy models. Read more…

Logistic regression is one of the most popular ways to fit models for categorical data, especially for binary response data. It is the most important (and probably most used) member of a class of models called generalized linear models. Unlike linear regression, logistic regression can directly predict probabilities (values that are restricted to the (0,1) interval); furthermore, those probabilities are well-calibrated when compared to the probabilities predicted by some other classifiers, such as Naive Bayes. Logistic regression preserves the marginal probabilities of the training data. The coefficients of the model also provide some hint of the relative importance of each input variable.

While you don’t have to know how to derive logistic regression or how to implement it in order to use it, the details of its derivation give important insights into interpreting and troubleshooting the resulting models. Unfortunately, most derivations (like the ones in [Agresti, 1990] or [Hastie, et.al, 2009]) are too terse for easy comprehension. Here, we give a derivation that is less terse (and less general than Agresti’s), and we’ll take the time to point out some details and useful facts that sometimes get lost in the discussion. Read more…

Programmers should definitely know how to use R. I don’t mean they should switch from their current language to R, but they should think of R as a handy tool during development. Read more…

One of the recurring frustrations in data analytics is that your data is never in the right shape. Worst case: you are not aware of this and every step you attempt is more expensive, less reliable and less informative than you would want. Best case: you notice this and have the tools to reshape your data.

There is no final “right shape.” In fact even your data is never right. You will always be called to re-do your analysis (new variables, new data, corrections) so you should always understand you are on your “penultimate analysis” (always one more to come). This is why we insist on using general methods and scripted techniques, as these methods are much much easier to reliably reapply on new data than GUI/WYSWYG techniques.

In this article we will work a small example and call out some R tools that make reshaping your data much easier. The idea is to think in terms of “relational algebra” (like SQL) and transform your data towards your tools (and not to attempt to adapt your tools towards the data in an ad-hoc manner). Read more…

With the well deserved popularity of A/B testing computer scientists are finally becoming practicing statisticians. One part of experiment design that has always been particularly hard to teach is how to pick the size of your sample. The two points that are hard to communicate are that:

• The required sample size is essentially independent of the total population size.
• The required sample size depends strongly on the strength of the effect you are trying to measure.

These things are only hard to explain because the literature is overly technical (too many buzzwords and too many irrelevant concerns) and these misapprehensions can’t be relieved unless you spend some time addressing the legitimate underlying concerns they are standing in for. As usual explanation requires common ground (moving to shared assumptions) not mere technical bullying.

We will try to work through these assumptions and then discuss proper sample size. Read more…