Dan Shiebler

Introduction There’s a famous scene in the HBO show “The Wire” where the unscrupulous Deputy Commissioner Rawls is addressing the police colonels and majors, and he says: Gentlemen, the word from on high is that the felony rates district by district will decline by five percent before the end of... [Read More]

There are 2 closely related quantities in statistics - correlation (often referred to as ) and the coefficient of determination (often referred to as ). Today we’ll explore the nature of the relationship between and , go over some common use cases for each statistic and address some misconceptions. Correlation... [Read More]

Deep neural networks are some of the most powerful learning algorithms that have ever been developed. Unfortunately, they are also some of the most complex. The hierarchical non-linear transformations that neural networks apply to data can be nearly impossible to understand. This problem is exacerbated by the non-determinism of neural... [Read More]

Let’s talk about making assumptions. Each time you form an opinion on something, you don’t re-examine each of the beliefs that contributed to that opinion. For example, when you order food at a restaurant, you pick the foods that you think will taste good. You don’t spend hours questioning the... [Read More]

One of my favorite classes in college was Abstract Algebra. It was my first non-CS non-elementary math class, and I took it because I knew I didn’t want to graduate without having broadened my mathematical horizons beyond CS. As it turned out, Abstract Algebra felt pretty familiar. Many of the... [Read More]