Learning Bayesian Statistics

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! Matt Hoffman has already worked on many topics in his life – music information retrieval, speech enhancement, user behavior modeling, social network analysis, astronomy, you name it. Obviously, picking questions for him was hard, so we ended up talking more or less freely — which is one of my favorite types...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! I love dresses. Not on me, of course — I’m not nearly elegant enough to pull it off. Nevertheless, to me, dresses are one of the most elegant pieces of clothing ever invented. And I like them even more when they change colors. Well, they don’t really change colors — it’s the way we perceive the colors that c...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! How does it feel to switch careers and start a postdoc at age 47? How was it to be one of the people who created the probabilistic programming language Stan? What should the Bayesian community focus on in the coming years? These are just a few of the questions I had for my illustrious guest in this episode —...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! If you’re a nerd like me, you’re always curious about the physics of any situation. So, obviously, when I watched Top Gun 2, I became fascinated by the aerodynamics of fighters jets. And it so happens that one of my friends used to be a fighter pilot for the Canadian army… Immediately, I thought this would m...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! We need to talk. I had trouble writing this introduction. Not because I didn’t know what to say (that’s hardly ever an issue for me), but because a conversation with Adrian Seyboldt always takes deliciously unexpected turns. Adrian is one of the most brilliant, interesting and open-minded person I know. It t...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! I’m guessing you already tried to communicate the results of a statistical model to non-stats people — it’s hard, right? I’ll be honest: sometimes, I even prefer to take notes during meetings than doing that… But shhh, that’s out secret. But all of this was before. Before I talked with Jessica Hullman. Jessi...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! What happens inside a black hole? Can we travel back in time? Why is the Universe even here? This is the type of chill questions that we’re all asking ourselves from time to time — you know, when we’re sitting on the beach. This is also the kind of questions Daniel Whiteson loves to talk about in his podcast...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! This episode will show you different sides of the tech world. The one where you research and apply algorithms, where you get super excited about image recognition and AI-generated art. And the one where you support social change actors — aka the “AI for Good” movement. My guest for this episode is, quite nat...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! Back in 2016, when I started dedicating my evenings and weekends to learning how to code and do serious stats, I was a bit lost… Where do I start? Which language do I pick? Why are all those languages just named with one single letter?? Then I found some stats classes by Justin Bois — and it was a tremendous...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! A great franchise comes with a great rivalry: Marvel has Iron Man and Captain America; physics has General Relativity and Quantum Physics; and Bayesian stats has Posterior Estimation and… Bayes Factors! A few months ago, I had the pleasure of hosting EJ Wagenmakers, to talk about these topics. This time, I’m...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! Hosting someone like Kevin Murphy on your podcast is… complicated. Not because Kevin himself is complicated (he’s delightful, don’t make me say what I didn’t say!), but because all the questions I had for him amounted to a 12-hour show. Sooooo, brace yourselves folks! No, I'm kidding. Of course I didn’t do t...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! Is there life in the Universe? It doesn’t get deeper than this, does it? And yet, why do we care about that? In the very small chance that there is other life in the Universe, we have even less chance to discover it, talk to it and meet it. So, why do we care? Well, it may surprise you but Bayesian statistic...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! I have to confess something: I love challenges. And when you’re a podcaster, what’s a better challenge than dedicating an episode to… visualization? Impossible you say? Well, challenge accepted! Thankfully, I got the help of a visualization Avenger for this episode — namely, Matthew Kay. Matt is an Assistant...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! Folks, there are some new cool kids on the block. They are called PyMC, Aeppl, and Aesara, and it’s high time we give us a proper welcome! To do that, who better than one of the architects of the new PyMC 4.0 — Ricardo Vieira! In this episode, he’ll walk us through the inner workings of the newly released ve...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! I’m sure you’ve already heard of gravitational waves, because my listeners are the coolest and smartest ever ;) But did you know about gravity waves? That’s right, waves in the sky due to gravity — sounds awesome, right? Well, I’m pretty sure that Laura Mansfield will confirm your prior. Currently a postdoc...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! Inviting someone like Luciano Paz on a stats podcast is both a pleasure and a challenge — he does so many things brilliantly that you have too many questions to ask him… In this episode, I’ve chosen — not without difficulty — to focus on the applications of Bayesian stats in the marketing industry, especiall...

Proudly sponsored by PyMC Labs , the Bayesian Consultancy. Book a call , or get in touch ! We talk a lot about generative modeling on this podcast — at least since episode 6, with Michael Betancourt! And an area where this way of modeling is particularly useful is healthcare, as Maria Skoularidou will tell us in this episode. Maria is a final year PhD student at the University of Cambridge. Her th...

The big problems with classic hypothesis testing are well-known. And yet, a huge majority of statistical analyses are still conducted this way. Why is it? Why are things so hard to change? Can you even do (and should you do) hypothesis testing in the Bayesian framework? I guess if you wanted to name this episode in a very Marvelian way, it would be “Bayes factors against the p-values of madness” —...

Why do we, humans, communicate? And how? And isn’t that a problem that to study communication we have to… communicate? Did you ever ask yourself that? Because J.P. de Ruiter did — and does everyday. But he’s got good reasons: JP is a cognitive scientist whose primary research focus is on the cognitive foundations of human communication. He aims to improve our understanding of how humans and artifi...

In large-scale one-off civil infrastructure, decision-making under uncertainty is part of the job, that’s just how it is. But, civil engineers don't get the luxury of building 10^6 versions of the bridge, offshore wind turbine or aeronautical structure to consider a relative frequency interpretation! And as you’ll hear, challenges don’t stop there: you also have to consider natural hazards such as...

You know when you have friends who wrote a book and pressure you to come on your podcast? That’s super annoying, right? Well that’s not what happened with Ravin Kumar , Osvaldo Martin and Junpeng Lao — I was the one who suggested doing a special episode about their new book, Bayesian Modeling and Computation in Python . And since they cannot say no to my soothing French accent, well, they didn’t s...

No, no, don't leave! You did not click on the wrong button. You are indeed on Alex Andorra’s podcast. The podcast that took the Bayesian world by a storm: “Learning Bayesian Statistics”, and that Barack Obama deemed “the best podcast in the whole galaxy” – or maybe Alex said that, I don’t remember. Alex made us discover new methods, new ideas, and mostly new people. But what do we really know abou...

Did you know there is a relationship between the size of firetrucks and the amount of damage down to a flat during a fire? The bigger the truck sent to put out the fire, the bigger the damages tend to be. The solution is simple: just send smaller firetrucks! Wait, that doesn’t sound right, does it? Our brain is a huge causal machine, so it can instinctively feel it’s not credible that size of truc...

What’s the common point between fiction, fake news, illusions and meditation? They can all be studied with Bayesian statistics, of course! In this mind-bending episode, Dominique Makowski will for sure expand your horizon. Trained as a clinical neuropsychologist, he is currently working as a postdoc at the Clinical Brain Lab in Singapore, in which he leads the Reality Bending Team. What’s reality-...

Let’s be honest: evolution is awesome! I started reading Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution , by Jonathan Losos, and I’m utterly fascinated.  So I’m thrilled to welcome Florian Hartig on the show. Florian is a professor of Theoretical Ecology at the University of Regensburg, Germany. His research concentrates on theory, computer simulations, statistical methods and mac...