Data Science for Fun and Profit

Wednesday 6th April 2016, 6:30 pm.

Speaker: Gary Short, Microsoft.

Venue: Room 4.31, University of Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB.

This event is free of charge and open to all. No registration required - just turn up.

Refreshments and networking from 6:00 pm.

This meeting is supported by NCR.

Synopsis

Make no mistake, data science can be hard, but it can also be fun. In this session I'll introduce you to Classic and Bayesian Statistics and Machine Learning, all through the medium of predicting horse racing results. We'll explore a number of techniques for making such predictions and finish by combining them into a powerful "mixed model" prediction engine that's sure to pick the next big winner. This session won't only improve your knowledge, it'll improve your bank balance too! Note: probably won't do the latter though. :-)

About the speaker

Gary Short is a Data Solution Architect for Microsoft. He specialises in machine learning and "big data" on the Azure Platform, but has an interest in data science, in all forms, especially computational linguistics and social network analysis.