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Win Vector LLC

Win Vector LLC
How About Pi ~ 31/32? At a quick glance: 32 is greater than 10. 31/32 is about 0.96875, not near pi ~ 3.141593. 31/10 =...
2 days ago
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2 days ago
At a quick glance: 32 is greater than 10. 31/32 is about 0.96875, not near pi ~ 3.141593. 31/10 = 3.1 is a worse approximation of pi than 22/7 ~ 3.142857.
Win Vector LLC
Don’t Let a Data Leak Sink Your Project One of the bigger risks of iterative statistical or machine learning fitting procedures is over-fit...
3 days ago
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3 days ago
One of the bigger risks of iterative statistical or machine learning fitting procedures is over-fit or the dreaded data leak. Over-fit is when: a model performs better on training data than on future data. Some degree of over-fit is expected. A data leak is when: the model learns...
Win Vector LLC
Working Through A Trivial Algorithm Whose Analysis Isn’t I have a new “crazy theorists” article up: “Working Through A Trivial Algorithm Whose Analysis...
a week ago
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a week ago
I have a new “crazy theorists” article up: “Working Through A Trivial Algorithm Whose Analysis Isn’t.” It is my notes on reading through Jonassen and Knuth’s amazing 1978 article analyzing 2 to 3 node search trees. You would think there couldn’t be a lot to that. But there is! I...
Win Vector LLC
Demonstrating Kelly Betting with Chips I have a new video demonstrating the Kelly Can’t Fail betting strategy. The idea is: this is a...
4 weeks ago
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4 weeks ago
I have a new video demonstrating the Kelly Can’t Fail betting strategy. The idea is: this is a classroom appropriate tool for discussing allocating assets in the presence of risk. The usual Kelly betting on coin-flips is too high variance to expect successful classroom...
Win Vector LLC
Is There a Difference Between Calculation and Computation? Recently I’ve been producing (for my own amusement) example Curta calculations. One motivation was...
a month ago
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a month ago
Recently I’ve been producing (for my own amusement) example Curta calculations. One motivation was arguing if a proposed solution method for Dudeney’s digits problem was something that could in fact have been easily executed in 1924. This got me thinking, is there an actual...
Win Vector LLC
Changing Forecasts for Python Questions on Stack Overflow I recently conducted a small time series workshop session for AI+ training hosted by ODSC. It went...
a month ago
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a month ago
I recently conducted a small time series workshop session for AI+ training hosted by ODSC. It went really well, and I’d be happy to offer longer interactive workshops going forward (please reach out if your team would like one!). One of the examples I shared was derived from the...
Win Vector LLC
Is GitHub Lying Here? My partners and I keep getting this spam-like email. I figured it was just a forgery. However, I...
a month ago
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a month ago
My partners and I keep getting this spam-like email. I figured it was just a forgery. However, I went on my own to our organization’s GitHub administration page and a similar message lives there. We run a small group, so I am pretty sure nobody has in fact asked for […]
Win Vector LLC
Don’t think of a basketball player, or search engines don’t even support “not” In my opinion we have been accepting poor interfaces and results from search engines for quite a...
a month ago
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a month ago
In my opinion we have been accepting poor interfaces and results from search engines for quite a while. This may be a small part of why the newer Large Language Models (LLMs) / Generative AIs look so good. The large language models at least implement a usable approximation of...
Win Vector LLC
Best Before Dates by Bass I was searching for one last real world example for my upcoming video talk March 13th on time series...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
I was searching for one last real world example for my upcoming video talk March 13th on time series forecasting. Hope to see you there! Or reach out to Win Vector LLC for custom training! I had the seemingly harmless thought: “Let’s look at Stack Overflow trends“. In particular...
Win Vector LLC
The Statistics of Drawing Cards After the positive reception of my cards article “Kelly can’t fail” I decided to share more of the...
2 months ago
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2 months ago
After the positive reception of my cards article “Kelly can’t fail” I decided to share more of the methods used to characterize card counting. So, I’d like to share my new article on the statistics of drawing cards. This note relates the distribution of draw cards (which can seem...
Win Vector LLC
Trying to Describe 2024 AI Premises I can’t resist adding yet another commentary on the state of 2024 AI (and, yes I know it is now 2025...
3 months ago
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3 months ago
I can’t resist adding yet another commentary on the state of 2024 AI (and, yes I know it is now 2025 and DeepSeek is relevant!). The 2024 AI money machine appears to have depended on several premises: The product would be valuable. The product would be very expensive to...
Win Vector LLC
Hat Color Puzzles Introduction Theoretical computer scientists tend to love a class of problems I call “hat color”...
3 months ago
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3 months ago
Introduction Theoretical computer scientists tend to love a class of problems I call “hat color” puzzles. There seem to be only a few of these puzzles, yet they feel like examples or tests for a large and important class of methodologies. I’d like to introduce a few of these...
Win Vector LLC
Reposting Partial Pooling Nina Zumel had some good articles on partial pooling estimators that I want to return to. It is a...
4 months ago
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4 months ago
Nina Zumel had some good articles on partial pooling estimators that I want to return to. It is a great technique to get more reliable models when using categorical variables. I wrote an introduction to them here some time ago. More importantly Nina has now repaired the damage to...
Win Vector LLC
What Fraction of Containerization is Just Working Around Dynamic Linking? Quick uniformed rant time. We live in a world of containerization and virtualization. Your average...
4 months ago
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4 months ago
Quick uniformed rant time. We live in a world of containerization and virtualization. Your average systems engineer wouldn’t dream of running something on an actual computer. Instead they would use Kubernetes, Docker, Podman, or who knows what else. These indirections or...
Win Vector LLC
Kelly Betting With Discrete Stakes In our note “Kelly Can’t Fail” we shared the “Next Card Bet” game as described in Peter Winkler’s...
4 months ago
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4 months ago
In our note “Kelly Can’t Fail” we shared the “Next Card Bet” game as described in Peter Winkler’s Mathematical Puzzles. Our observation is the amazing zero variance strategy shown is in fact the Kelly criteria. Which means, this is a surprising situation where the Kelly strategy...
Win Vector LLC
Kelly Can’t Fail Introduction You may have heard of the Kelly bet allocation strategy. It is a system for correctly...
4 months ago
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4 months ago
Introduction You may have heard of the Kelly bet allocation strategy. It is a system for correctly exploiting information or bias in a gambling situation. It is also known as a maximally aggressive or high variance strategy, in that betting more than the Kelly selection can be...
Win Vector LLC
Examining Meta-Analysis Joseph Rickert and I put together an experiment trying to both run a standard meta-analysis and then...
5 months ago
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5 months ago
Joseph Rickert and I put together an experiment trying to both run a standard meta-analysis and then reproduce similar results directly using Bayesian methods. I think it came out really interesting and we share it here at R Works and also here on Github. A meta-analysis is an...
Win Vector LLC
Calculating at Pencil and Paper Scale Introduction It can be fun to drive a problem all the way into the ground. I don’t always get to do...
6 months ago
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6 months ago
Introduction It can be fun to drive a problem all the way into the ground. I don’t always get to do that on paying projects, however sometimes I can do it with hobby projects. In this case I am going to re-solve Dudeney’s Remainder Problem again and again to argue […]
Win Vector LLC
ODSC West 2024 I had a great time at ODSC West 2024. And it was really wonderful to get to talk with Sheamus...
6 months ago
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6 months ago
I had a great time at ODSC West 2024. And it was really wonderful to get to talk with Sheamus McGovern again! Thank you ODSC for putting together a great conference and being wonderful hosts at ODSCWest. I had a great time, and was very energized by all of the […]
Win Vector LLC
The Monkey and the Coconuts: An Introduction to the Extended Euclidean Algorithm I have a fun new puzzle and matching algorithm demonstration to share. The Monkey and the Coconuts:...
6 months ago
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6 months ago
I have a fun new puzzle and matching algorithm demonstration to share. The Monkey and the Coconuts: An Introduction to the Extended Euclidean Algorithm Photo by Judgefloro – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43063034 Toying with the idea of...