James Davenport
Professor of Information Technology at the University of Bath, in both Mathematical Sciences and Computer Science. Is on ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42/WG 3: Trustworthiness of Artificial Intelligence.
Location Bath, UK
Activity
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Indeed: there's another example of postcode discrimination here: https://www.propublica.org/article/asians-nearly-twice-as-likely-to-get-higher-price-from-princeton-review
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James Davenport made a comment
Certainly both good comments. But I think these aren't the only problems: keep looking!
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By and large, yes. But a bad experiment poorly reported can have pretty negative consequences: look at the negative publicity for MMR because of a seriously flawed experiment. And that's far from the only case.
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Nice find. But at least the headline is 'may': we often see much more definitive headlines :-(
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That's an interesting observation - any supporting data?
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James Davenport replied to Patrizia Kaye
Thanks for pointing that out. Proofreading is rarely perfect!
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Certainly we can't make a 100% determination. These data are often used by social scientists, in my view somewhat dubiously. See https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04997-3 for an example. In my view, if anything this article actually shows that people whose friends have expensive mobile 'phones tend to have expensive mobile 'phones.
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Sorry about that: Loughborough seem to have put this in. Here's an alternative link to the same material: https://nucinkis-lab.cc.ic.ac.uk/HELM/HELM_Workbooks_31-35/WB35-all.pdf
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James Davenport made a comment
If in doubt, PUT brackets in!
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James Davenport made a comment
Good that some of you have tried this - I hope the rest of you also tried it. Note that there ISN'T a winner. This is perfectly possible in real life as well, and is why there is no perfect method of voting, a result generally known as the Condorcet-Dodgson paradox: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox .
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James Davenport replied to Patrizia Kaye
Indeed, and because they have the intersection of two sets, they could well inherit the biases of both. A cautionary tale!
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James Davenport made a comment
Glad you enjoyed it. Yes, Python is relatively easy as computer languages go (said with feeling!)
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5 is 'True', because "False" is a string, and False is a boolean value.
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James Davenport replied to Todd Donnelly
Really good idea to include units: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter .
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James Davenport replied to Kelly Brunsdon
Indeed. English is particularly ambiguous, as here, because 'bite' can be both a noun and a verb.
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That's a question for the OU (or any other university you'd apply to) rather than us, I'm afraid.
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James Davenport made a comment
Patrizia is certainly right to raise the concerns over privacy. And just saying 'blockchain' certainly isn't the answer.
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James Davenport made a comment
Good comment about "statistically significant". But there isn't a simple 'magic bullet' here: the American Statistical Association has a good note here: http://www.amstat.org/asa/files/pdfs/P-ValueStatement.pdf. A (far too) common test is "p<0.05" meaning "has a less than 5% probability of occurring by chance". But Data Science and computer power make it...
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Indeed, Data Science requires a range of skills, so good luck all!
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James Davenport replied to Nameera Khan
As the old joke goes "He uses statistics the way a drunken man uses a lamppost: for support rather than for illumination"
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Thanks Tom.
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James Davenport replied to Laura C
I think Laura has an important point here. The old phrase in computing was "garbage in, garbage out" (abbreviated to GIGO) and that's probably appropriate here.
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James Davenport replied to Rachel Avbulimen
Good, ambitious, questions. There will be several legal/ethical questions around collecting and analysing such data, but that shouldn't stop you from trying.
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James Davenport replied to Shogo Watanabe
Nice motivation. The sport that's made the most use of big data/analytics is probably baseball: see for example https://hbr.org/2019/07/what-baseball-can-teach-you-about-using-data-to-improve-yourself .
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James Davenport replied to Stephen Roesner
The most important thing about a convention is that it should be applied consistently. The bigger the project the more important this is.
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@NiallBuswell : this doesn't quite work. What happens if I say N/N/N/Y/Y - I get no drink but with both milks.
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James Davenport replied to Yaokai W
Also, interdisciplinary teamwork - it requires a team with more skills background than one person normally has.
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To all, but in response to this remark - that's one reason we built this course, to help people realise their gaps.
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James Davenport made a comment
A good set of motivations so far - broad, but that's to be expected, as AI and DS are very widely applicable.
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James Davenport made a comment
All good comments here.
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Days of the week, certainly. Hence the original design certainly has a problem, as several jave mentioned. But also holidays (which can differ by country, in the event of an internationally-oriented website).
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Good point - it could be argued that Facebook has hijacked the word "friend"
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James Davenport replied to Eleanor Williams
Good point. There are pros and cons to suppressing a very large item. I'd have been tempted to use the 'broken y axis' technique in this case. But hindsight is always better!
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Appreciating that you have a lot to learn is part of the journey, and much better than not appreciating it.
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James Davenport made a comment
Sticking with the coffee theme, there's a popular article on the "does coffee stunt children's growth" myth at https://www.livescience.com/coffee-does-not-stunt-growth.html : there's a correlation between coffee and osteoporosis, but that's because coffee drinkers tend to drink less milk.
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Indeed, and without a great deal of care, AI can easily replicate, and quite possibly exaggerate, existing biases.
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James Davenport replied to Michael Morehouse
@MichaelMorehouse Do you want to drop me a mail (masjhd@bath.ac.uk) to take this one further?
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James Davenport replied to Michael Morehouse
@MichaelMorehouse Indeed - I was just starting to re-read this and had the same thought. But BMI is still in use, e.g. for Covid prioritisation: https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/invited-covid-vaccine-because-nhs-19857990?utm_source=nsday&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NSDAY_180221
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James Davenport made a comment
And a more general lesson is that there needn't be a clear winner. This shows up in PR voting as the Condorcet-Dodgson paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox
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James Davenport replied to Sally B
Absolutely right that there are a lot of assumptions, many of which are driven by availability of (quality) data. The technical phrase would be that we are using insurance data as a proxy for accident data.
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James Davenport replied to Mark Johnston
And I'll be looking at today's comments
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The fragmentation issue is an interesting one. A lot of health research (e.g. on alcoholism) comes out of the U.S. Veterans Administration because they have essentially perfect tracking of their patients across multiple hospitals etc.
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James Davenport replied to Sally B
Sally B: good points. There is a lot of work in "medical ontologies" (read 'structured vocabularies') to ensure that the same terms are used, but it seems to me, as one who follows ontologies but isn't a doctor, that these are of limited scope. "Cause of death" for example, is one where the principal cause is well-structured, but secondary conditions tend to...
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James Davenport replied to Kweku .
Just to correct Kweku: that's 1%, or 0.01. The deeper question he asks is interesting, but I don't have a definite answer. It depends crucially on the question: "does this suit 90% of the population" is very different from "does this suit people independent of neurodiversity".
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James Davenport replied to Regina Zaghi
And indeed problems that can be got wrong without machine learning. For example the English 2020 A-levels debacle was ssentially done without machine learning, despite the claims of "mutant algorithms".
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James Davenport replied to Mahalakshmi S
And also Data Exploration will involve some Visualisation: drawing a number of 2D/3D plots and so on.
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James Davenport replied to Mahalakshmi S
Thanks for the comments on absolute numbers of Twitter users. What about the percentage of the population that are Twitter users?
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James Davenport made a comment
Almost correct. Number 5 is the following "False" != False .
The first argument to != is a string, and the second is a Boolean. Booleans interoperate with integers (see the next example), BUT NOT with strings. So this is in fact True, and would be True for any string. Similarly "Zero" != 0 -
James Davenport made a comment
Thanks - bug reported.
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James Davenport made a comment
You might want to consider whether the user voluntarily provides the data gathered by the facebook pixel: https://en-gb.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-pixel
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James Davenport made a comment
You should really give the basis of your calculations, not just the answers.
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James Davenport made a comment
"Fruit flies like a banana" - not the way I throw bananas!
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James Davenport made a comment
I think all these might need more detail. Max's step 3 is good but probably needs a definition of 'heated'.
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James Davenport made a comment
The distinction between correlation and causation is extremely important. One of the better examples is at https://blogs.ams.org/blogonmathblogs/2017/04/10/divorce-and-margarine/
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James Davenport made a comment
Zac's point about representation of minorities is important, as we were also seeing over the coronavirus vaccine.
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James Davenport made a comment
Looks like the broken link has been fixed
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James Davenport made a comment
You might think shopping habits were innocuous, but consider the story (search for 'Minneapolis') in https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html
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James Davenport made a comment
Good comments about bias (often unconscious). Going back to Florence Nightingale, the joy of her polar graphics was that they convinced people that "died in war" was not the same as "died in battle", which was people's unconscious assumption.
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James Davenport made a comment
I suspect what is meant is https://www.open.edu/openlearn/body-mind/health/health-sciences/the-joy-stats-the-lady-data-visualisation but I'll check.
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James Davenport made a comment
Indeed, as several have said, it takes insight to ask the right questions
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James Davenport made a comment
All good introductions, and a variety of backgrounds to learn from each other.
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Personally, I'd add "presentation skills" to the personal qualities.
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"So much to learn" - yes, it's a broad field. And though all the hype goes on "data scientist", many of them, much of the time, are really data engineers. See https://blog.panoply.io/what-is-the-difference-between-a-data-engineer-and-a-data-scientist for one person's view of the difference.
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James Davenport replied to Muhammad Ali
Is that "No" saying "No comments" or a negative response?
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James Davenport made a comment
Lot of useful comments here, and plenty of focus on health and supporting people. Of course, these areas also have significant privacy concerns.
