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A collection of 123 issues

Online Learning With Biased Sampling

Say that you train a model to predict who will click on an ad. Say that you deploy the model to only show ads to people who are likely to click on them. (For a discussion about the optimal strategy for whom to show ads to, see here.) And say

Conscious Uncoupling: Separating Compliance from Treatment

Let’s say that we want to measure the effect of a phone call encouraging people to register to vote on voting. Let’s define compliance as a person taking the call (like they do in Gerber and Green, 2000, etc.). And let’s assume that the compliance rate is

Prediction Errors: Using ML For Measurement

Say you want to measure how often people visit pornographic domains over some period. To measure that, you build a model to predict whether or not a domain hosts pornography. And let’s assume that for the chosen classification threshold, the False Positive rate (FP) is 10\% and the False

Comparing Ad Targeting Regimes

Ad targeting is often useful when you have multiple things to sell (opportunity cost), when the cost of running an ad is non-trivial, when an irrelevant ad reduces your ability to reach the user later, or any combination of the above. (For a more formal treatment, see below.) targetingtargeting.pdf133

What's Relevant? Learning from Organic Growth

Say that we want to find people to whom a product is relevant. One way to do that is to launch a small campaign advertising the product and learn from people who click on the ad, or better yet, learn from people who not just click on the ad but

Quality Data: Plumbing ML Data Pipelines

What’s the difference between a scientist and a data scientist? Scientists often collect their own data, and data scientists often use data collected by other people. That is part jest but speaks to an important point. Good scientists know their data. Good data scientists must know their data, too.

Optimal Sequence in Which to Service Orders

What is the optimal order in which to service orders assuming a fixed budget? Let's assume that we have to service orders $o_1,…,…o_n$, with the n orders iterated by $i$. Let's also assume that for each service order, we know how the costs

Optimal Sequence in Which to Schedule Appointments

Say that you have a travel agency. Your job is to book rooms at hotels. Some hotels fill up more quickly than others, and you want to figure out which hotels to book at first so that your net booking rate is as high as it could be with the

Automating Understanding, Not Just ML

Some of the most complex parts of Machine Learning are largely automated. The modal ML person types in simple commands for very complex operations, and voila! Some companies, like Microsoft (Azure) and DataRobot, also provide a UI for this. And this has generally not turned out well. Why? Because this