Pritul Patel

VARIANCE

Technology EN ↓ 3 episodes

Variance explores the journeys of Data scientists, Product owners, Econometricians, Consultants specializing in the field of Experimentation and Observational Causal inference. Hosted by Pritul, a Data scientist who has spent 11 years scaling experimentation methods, infrastructure, and programs at scale at companies like Apple (Apple Podcasts), Peacock TV (streaming), ebay (ecommerce), and Yahoo (media), solving unique challenges of statistics and scalability. Each episode is with a new guest where topics like debates in statistical methods, history, unique perspectives.

Author

Pritul Patel

Episodes

What Baseball Taught Us About Automating Judgment 23.05.2026 7:01

MLB spent 7 years running a real-world experiment to automate the strike zone — and it nearly broke baseball. In this episode, we dig into what a Cornell research team found when they traced every design decision in the Automated Ball-Strike System: the strike zone was never what the rulebook said. What looks like a simple binary rule turned out to be 150 years of accumulated human judgment — and...

Statistical Pitfalls in Tech Experimentation - My Journey Through eBay, Apple and Yahoo 03.03.2025 21:57

In this special second episode, the roles reverse as I share some stories from my extensive experimentation background across tech giants like eBay, Apple, and Yahoo. This is a cut from my first episode with Ishan where Ishan asked me about my experience. Discover the statistical challenges that plagued major experimentation platforms - from misaligned alpha thresholds and rampant false positives...

Ishan Goel - From Computer Science to Data Science Research 07.02.2025 55:30

Welcome to the first episode of Variance, a podcast where I explore experimentation, basic statistics, and data science career through conversations with industry experts. In this episode, I sit down with Ishan Goel, former Associate Head of Data Science at VWO (Visual Website Optimizer), where he led data science research and helped build VWO's new stats engine. Topics covered include: 🟣 Tr...