Occam's Razor
APRIL 4, 2011
Someone asked me this very simple question today. What's the difference between web reporting and web analysis? My instinct was to use the wry observation uttered by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in trying to define po rn: " I know it when I see it. " That applies to what is analysis. I know it when I see it. : ). That, of course, would have been an unhelpful answer.
Edwin Chen
APRIL 26, 2011
How do you know what machine learning algorithm to choose for your classification problem? Of course, if you really care about accuracy, your best bet is to test out a couple different ones (making sure to try different parameters within each algorithm as well), and select the best one by cross-validation. But if you’re simply looking for a “good enough” algorithm for your problem, or a place to start, here are some general guidelines I’ve found to work well over the year
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Occam's Razor
APRIL 25, 2011
Every presentation I do is customized for the audience in the room. That means I get to spend loads and loads of time across many industry verticals, see many many campaigns, translate many many foreign websites (thanks Google Chrome for auto-translate!) and meet many many many executives and hear about their digital marketing strategies, challenges and outcomes.
Edwin Chen
APRIL 24, 2011
Kickstarter is an online crowdfunding platform for launching creative projects. When starting a new project, project owners specify a deadline and the minimum amount of money they need to raise. They receive the money (less a transaction fee) only if they reach or exceed that minimum; otherwise, no money changes hands. What’s particularly fun about Kickstarter is that in contrast to that other microfinance site , Kickstarter projects don’t ask for loans; instead, patrons receive pre-
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Edwin Chen
APRIL 30, 2011
(See a demo here.). While working on a Twitter sentiment analysis project, I ran into the problem of needing to filter out all non-English tweets. (Asking the Twitter API for English-only tweets doesn’t seem to work, as it nonetheless returns tweets in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, and a couple other languages.). Since I didn’t have any labeled data, I thought it would be fun to build an unsupervised language classifier.
Edwin Chen
APRIL 20, 2011
(For a layman’s introduction, see here.). Least Angle Regression (aka LARS) is a model selection method for linear regression (when you’re worried about overfitting or want your model to be easily interpretable). To motivate it, let’s consider some other model selection methods: Forward selection starts with no variables in the model, and at each step it adds to the model the variable with the most explanatory power, stopping if the explanatory power falls below some threshold.
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