A simple guide to setting default plotting parameters in matplotlib’s rcParam — Matplotlib gets a lot of stick I think it’s unfair. I’ll admit that if you just run plt.plot() then you’ll get something quite ugly but it is, in my view, the best plotting package in python and a largely unavoidable one. Alternatives Ok, so you don’t like matplotlib and are considering…

How to double your rate of experimentation and double your experimentation output — Statistical significance in AB testing is pretty widely regarded as a benchmark statistic for deciding when to stop an experiment and ultimately whether to roll out a new feature following an AB test. …

At Typeform we’ve adopted GrowthBook as our experimentation platform for AB testing. GrowthBook calculates 3 Bayesian statistics on your metrics to help you draw conclusions about your new features: Uplift Chance to Beat Control Loss or Risk of Choosing Variant In this article I’ll explain what they are and how…

An open source approach to streamlining A/B testing — GrowthBook is an open source tool for AB testing offering both feature flagging functionality and analysis tooling. The analysis tooling, which is the focus of this article, sits over the top of your data warehouse and interacts through SQL queries with any existing data you’re collecting on your users. …

I’ve spent much of the past year prototyping, productionising, and developing the efficient learning algorithm for BBC Bitesize. Our ambitions for the Bayesian framework that underpins the Bitesize quiz have always gone beyond just a quiz. Once we got the initial prototype of the quiz up and running we turned…

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. Is…

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…