Introduction¶
How many sample do you need to predict the proportion of fake account in a social network?
Obviously, if human manually check every account one by one for ALL the accounts in the social network, we can get the actual proportion of the fake accounts. But this would be too expensive and time consuming, especially when social accounts nowadays contain billions of active accounts! Facebook has 2 billion users, LinkedIn has .5 billion users.
Gentle Hands-on Introduction to Propensity Score Matching
Introduction¶
Data Scientists need to help making business decisions by providing insights from data. To answer to the questions like "does a new feature improve user engagement?", data scientists may conduct A/B testing to see if there is any "causal" effect of new feature on user's engagement, evaluated with certain metric. Before diving into causal inference in observational study, let's talk about more common approach: A/B testing and its limitation.
Inverse transform sampling and other sampling techniques
Random number generation is important techniques in various statistical modeling, for example, to create Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm, or simple Monte Carlo simulation. Here, I make notes on some standard sampling techiniques, and demonstrate its useage in R.
Inverse Transform Sampling¶
Inverse Transform Sampling is a powerful sampling technique because you can generate samples from any distribution with this technique, as long as its cumulative distribution function exists.