In this article, I’m going to give an overview of Bayesian statistics and talk about how we utilise user data to personalise and improve BBC Bitesize’s Efficient Learning GCSE quiz. Example Let’s start with an example for context. Suppose you flip a coin 3 times and get heads each time. …

Can we tell whether kids are in school just from the viewing of certain TV shows on BBC iPlayer? Spoiler— yes! We can also identify when schools are closed due to snow! This was the first project I worked on at the BBC, and remains one of the most fun…

This was exactly the situation that our Data Science Team faced during the Covid-19 crisis in March 2020. Find out how we created an ML quiz engine with no data or questions. To find out how we did, try it for yourself!

In the first week of the UK’s lockdown, a co-worker shared this article from the Washington Post. I was inspired by the great simulations of how diseases spread and the demonstrations of how some social distancing measures can help to reduce the spread. In response to reading the article, I…

A beautiful data visualisation speaks a thousand words. Inspired by a talk I saw by David Spiegelhalter last year I’ve created an easy to use python package to create visually stunning dot plots. Note from the editors: Towards Data Science is a Medium publication primarily based on the study of…

I’ve previously discussed how term-frequency inverse document-frequency (tf-idf) can be used to calculate content association metrics between individual pieces of BBC content. By using our customer browsing data we can study the overlap in users between each pair of content items and deduce how similar they are. One challenge with…

The BBC produces fantastic content that appeals to a mass audience such as Killing Eve and Bodyguard on BBC iPlayer, the Danger Mouse games for CBBC, and Match of the Day on the BBC Sport, to name a few. While it’s great that we can produce content that is enjoyed…

BANs or big ass numbers are a visualisation technique that are frequently overlooked in favour of unnecessarily complex graphs. While some stakeholders might need to know sales figures going back 18 months and need lots of stats about how last week performed, for others a top level stat that can…

So you’ve done some clustering using k-means; you’ve scaled your data, applied PCA, checked the clusters using the elbow and the silhouette method and you’re pretty confident that your model is giving you the absolute best clustering you can get. But just how much trust can you place in the…