Cathy O'Neil may need no introduction to blog readers. She's the author of the hard-hitting MathBabe blog, and she shares my passion for explaining how data analysis really works. She is co-author of the recent book Doing Data Science (link), with Rachel Schutt. Cathy has a varied career spanning academia and industry, as she explains below. *** KF: How did you pick up your impressive statistical reasoning skills? CO: Thanks…
I am excited to chat with Professor David Spiegelhalter, who is no strangers to our UK audience, and our statistics colleagues. Perhaps his most well-known contribution is the DIC criterion for model selection, introduced by a paper by him and collaborators. He holds the impressive title of Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge (link). He also writes a blog called Understanding Uncertainty (link),…
Yesterday, Larry Cahoon, a 29-year veteran at the Census Bureau, answered some questions. The rest of the interview is printed below. *** KF: How can a data analyst improve his or her skills? LC: I have to say my best training has been many, many hours of just playing with statistics, playing with graphics, and reading the analysis others have done. The more data I see, the more analysis I…
A short while ago, I introduced Larry Cahoon's blog, GoodStatsBadStats. He started the blog almost two years ago after retiring from the US Census Bureau (site offline due to government shutdown), where he spent 29 years working on the statistical design of most of the household surveys conducted by the Bureau. Cahoon received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. Cahoon spent the final seven years of his career working on…
In the first chapter of my first book, Numbers Rule Your World (link), I explored the concept of variability using a pair of examples, one of which was Disney's FastPass virtual reservation system. Truly grasping the ins and outs of variability is one of the most important objectives for a budding statistician (or data scientist). In the discussion, I highlighted the work of Len Testa, whose website, TouringPlans.com, provides custom,…
Professor Andrew Gelman is a pioneer in statistics blogging. His blog is one of my regular reads, a mixture of theoretical pieces, applied work, psychological musing, rants about unethical academics, advocacy of statistical graphics, and commentary on literature. He's one of the few statisticians who gets opinion pieces published in the New York Times. His expertise is statistics in politics, but I also enjoy his work on the stop-and-frisk policies…
Today's Numbersense Pros features Dean Baker, an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. His blog, Beat the Press, is my first stop for economics news. What attracts me is his data-first attitude. Every post on his site is about interpreting economic data--there is none of the data-free theorizing that is typical on other economics blogs. Baker adopts a cynical, almost satirical, tone, which is fun…
Today, I have the honor of interviewing Avinash Kaushik, author of the bible known as Web Analytics 2.0, and a digital marketing evangelist at Google. He also has a must-read blog called Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor is a principle championed by statisticians that can be summarized as "as simple as possible but not too simple". It is a principle and therefore it also draws controversy from some quarters. Kaushik's blog…
