Data Science Disentangled
Category: application
The Institute for Ethical Machine Learning compiled this amazing curated list of open source libraries that will help you deploy, monitor, version, scale, and secure your production machine learning.
The Institute for Ethical Machine Learning is a think-tank that brings together with technology leaders, policymakers & academics to develop standards for ML.
According to Jake Voytko, data science and engineering teams run more efficiently and spread knowledge more quickly when there is a single person setting the technical direction of a team. The so-called “tech lead“.
Sometimes tech lead is an official title, referring to the position between an engineering manager and the engineering team. Oftentimes it is just a unofficial role one grows in to.
Now, according to Jake, you can learn to become a tech lead. And you can be good at it too. Somebody has to do it, so it might as well be you! It could allow you to leverage your time to move the organization forward, and enables you to influence data science or engineering throughout the entire team!
In this original blog, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading, Jake explains in more detail what it takes to be(come) a good tech lead. Here just the headers copied, but if you’re interested, take a look at the full article:
And this is what Jake feels his work week looks like as a tech lead:
Cover image via TeamGantt.com
A/B testing is a method of comparing two versions of some thing against each other to determine which is better. A/B tests are often mentioned in e-commerce contexts, where the things we are comparing are web pages.
Business leaders and data scientists alike face a difficult trade-off when running A/B tests: How big should the A/B test be? Or in other words, After collecting how many data points, or running for how many days, should we make a decision whether A or B is the best way to go?
This is a tradeoff because the sample size of an A/B test determines its statistical power. This statistical power, in simple terms, determines the probability of a A/B test showing an effect if there is actually really an effect. In general, the more data you collect, the higher the odds of you finding the real effect and making the right decision.
By default, researchers often aim for 80% power, with a 5% significance cutoff. But is this general guideline really optimal for the tradeoff between costs and benefits in your specific business context? Chris thinks not.
Chris said wrote a great three-piece blog in which he explains how you can mathematically determine the optimal duration of A/B-testing in your own company setting:
Part I: General Overview. Starts with a mostly non-technical overview and ends with a section called “Three lessons for practitioners”.
Part II: Expected lift. A more technical section that quantifies the benefits of experimentation as a function of sample size.
Part III: Aggregate time-discounted lift. A more technical section that quantifies the costs of experimentation as a function of sample size. It then combines costs and benefits into a closed-form expression that can be optimized. Ends with an FAQ.
Chris Said (via)
Moreover, Chris provides three practical advices that show underline 80% statistical power is not always the best option:
Chris ran all his simulations in Python and shared the notebooks.
Several Chinese Ph.D. students wrote a PyTorch program that can turn your holiday pictures into 3D sceneries. They call it 3D photo inpainting. Here are some examples
And here’s the new method compares to previous techniques:
Here are several links to more detailed resources: [Paper] [Project Website] [Google Colab] [GitHub]
We propose a method for converting a single RGB-D input image into a 3D photo, i.e., a multi-layer representation for novel view synthesis that contains hallucinated color and depth structures in regions occluded in the original view. We use a Layered Depth Image with explicit pixel connectivity as underlying representation, and present a learning-based inpainting model that iteratively synthesizes new local color-and-depth content into the occluded region in a spatial context-aware manner. The resulting 3D photos can be efficiently rendered with motion parallax using standard graphics engines. We validate the effectiveness of our method on a wide range of challenging everyday scenes and show fewer artifacts when compared with the state-of-the-arts.
Via github.com/vt-vl-lab/3d-photo-inpainting
I love how people are using data and data science to fight fake news these days (see also Identifying Dirty Twitter Bots), and I recently came across another great example.
Conspirador Norteño (real name unkown) is a member of what they call #TheResistance. It’s a group of data scientists discovering and analyzing so-called botnets – networks of artificial accounts on social media websites, like Twitter.
TheResistance uses quantitative analysis to unveil large groups of fake accounts, spreading potential fake news, or fake-endorsing the (fake) news spread by others.
In a recent Twitter thread, Norteno shows how they discovered that many of Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (self-proclaimed Inventor of Email) his early followers are likely bots.
They looked at the date of these accounts started following Shiva, offset by the date of their accounts’ creation. A remarkeable pattern appeared:
Although @va_shiva‘s recent followers look unremarkable, a significant majority of his first 5000 followers appear to have been created in batches and to have subsequently followed @va_shiva in rapid succession.
Looking at those followers in more detail, other suspicious patterns emerge. Their names follow a same pattern, they have an about equal amount of followers, followings, tweets, and (no) likes. Moreover, they were created only seconds apart. Many of them seem to follow each other as well.
If that wasn’t enough proof of something’s off, here’s a variety of their tweets… Not really what everyday folks would tweet right? Plus similar patterns again across acounts.
At first, I thought, so what? This Shiva guy probably just set up some automated (Python?) scripts to make Twitter account and follow him. Good for him. It worked out, as his most recent 10k followers followed him organically.
However, it becomes more scary if you notice this Shiva guy is (succesfully) promoting the firing of people working for the government:
Anyways, wanted to share this simple though cool approach to finding bots & fake news networks on social media. I hope you liked it, and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments!
Sometimes I find these AI / programming hobby projects that I just wished I had thought of…
Will Stedden combined OpenAI’s GPT-2 deep learning text generation model with another deep-learning language model by Google called BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and created an elaborate architecture that had one purpose: posting the best replies on Reddit.
The architecture is shown at the end of this post — copied from Will’s original blog here. Moreover, you can read this post for details regarding the construction of the system. But let me see whether I can explain you what it does in simple language.
The below is what a Reddit comment and reply thread looks like. We have str8cokane making a comment to an original post (not in the picture), and then tupperware-party making a reply to that comment, followed by another reply by str8cokane. Basically, Will wanted to create an AI/bot that could write replies like tupperware-party that real people like str8cokane would not be able to distinguish from “real-people” replies.
Note that with 4 points, str8cokane‘s original comments was “liked” more than tupperware-party‘s reply and str8cokane‘s next reply, which were only upvoted 2 and 1 times respectively.
So here’s what the final architecture looks like, and my attempt to explain it to you.
The results are astonishing! Will’s bot sounds like a real youngster internet troll! Do have a look at the original blog, but here are some examples. Note that tupperware-party — the Reddit user from the above example — is actually Will’s AI.
Will ends his blog with a link to the tutorial if you want to build such a bot yourself. Have a try!
Moreover, he also notes the ethical concerns:
I know there are definitely some ethical considerations when creating something like this. The reason I’m presenting it is because I actually think it is better for more people to know about and be able to grapple with this kind of technology. If just a few people know about the capacity of these machines, then it is more likely that those small groups of people can abuse their advantage.
I also think that this technology is going to change the way we think about what’s important about being human. After all, if a computer can effectively automate the paper-pushing jobs we’ve constructed and all the bullshit we create on the internet to distract us, then maybe it’ll be time for us to move on to something more meaningful.
If you think what I’ve done is a problem feel free to email me , or publically shame me on Twitter.
Will Stedden via bonkerfield.org/2020/02/combining-gpt-2-and-bert/
