Machine Learning Advocate

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Making Sense of Data: From Statistics to AI

In today's data-driven world, the terms statistics, data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are often used interchangeably, yet each field...

mladvocate
Oct 12, 2024 3 min read

From Mendel’s Peas to ChatGPT: A History of Machine Learning

The journey of machine learning is a captivating tale that spans centuries, from the humble pea plants in a 19th-century monastery...

mladvocate
Oct 9, 2024 6 min read

What is Machine Learning? A Beginner’s Guide

Your phone’s camera doesn’t just take pictures anymore. It decides when to use night mode, adjusts focus automatically, and can even...

mladvocate
Oct 3, 2024 2 min read

Welcome to Machine Learning Advocate

ChatGPT answering your questions, your iPhone sorting photos by face, Netflix deciding what to show you next. All of it is...

mladvocate
Sep 28, 2024 43 sec read

Foundations

How Machine Learning Works: It’s Not Learning

A machine learning model doesn’t work the way you probably think it does. When most people hear the word learning, they...

mladvocate
Mar 7, 2026 3 min read

Machine Learning Foundations Part 4: Understanding Hardware

When your phone slows down because too many apps are open, it lags, gets warm, and everything takes twice as long...

mladvocate
Dec 29, 2024 2 min read

Machine Learning Foundations Part 3: Understanding Algorithms

This is Part 3 of our Foundations series. In Part 1, we covered data. In Part 2, models. Now we’re looking...

mladvocate
Dec 17, 2024 2 min read

Machine Learning Foundations Part 2: Understanding Models

This is Part 2 of our Foundations series. In Part 1, we covered data. Now we’re looking at models: what they...

mladvocate
Dec 8, 2024 2 min read

Machine Learning Foundations Part 1: Understanding Data

Data: The Foundation of Machine Learning This is the first post in a 4-part series that takes you behind the scenes...

mladvocate
Nov 22, 2024 10 min read

Mental Models

What Is Cross Validation in Machine Learning

Cross validation in machine learning is not just a technique for testing a model. It is a way of asking a...

mladvocate
Apr 5, 2026 4 min read

What Is Overfitting in Machine Learning

Overfitting is not a model failing to learn. It is a model that learned exactly what it was shown, and nothing...

mladvocate
Apr 5, 2026 3 min read

What Regularization Does (and Why Your Model Needs It)

Overfitting is not a mistake the model makes. It is what happens when a model does exactly what it is told....

mladvocate
Mar 19, 2026 4 min read

Machine Learning for Non-Technical Professionals

Why Your “Silly Questions” Are Product Requirements We have a technical writer on our team. She’s sharp, curious, and exactly the...

mladvocate
Feb 27, 2026 7 min read

A Friendly Introduction to Principal Component Analysis

Most datasets don’t have two or three measurements per observation. They have dozens, sometimes hundreds. A patient record might include blood...

mladvocate
Feb 24, 2026 5 min read

Bias Variance Tradeoff: Why Your ML Model Can’t Have It All

For years, every time I fixed one problem with my models, I created another one. Make the model more sophisticated to...

mladvocate
Apr 24, 2025 3 min read

Mathematics and Statistics

Machine Learning Math: Start Simple, Learn as You Go

Last year a data analyst I work with told me she’d closed a machine learning tutorial after the first page. Too...

mladvocate
Jan 21, 2025 1 min read

ML in the Wild

Machine Learning in Healthcare: AI Scribes and Heart Disease Screening

How ambient AI scribes turn doctor-patient conversations into clinical notes, and how a University of Michigan model detects hidden heart disease...

mladvocate
Feb 15, 2026 4 min read

Machine Learning in the NBA: Player Tracking and Injury Prevention

Every NBA arena has cameras mounted in the catwalks that track every player and the ball at 25 frames per second....

mladvocate
Feb 8, 2026 2 min read

Strike Zone Prediction Model: How Neural Networks Analyze MLB Statcast Data

Baseball has always been a numbers game. Batting averages, earned run averages, and RBIs have been part of the sport for...

mladvocate
Feb 8, 2026 2 min read

How Formula 1 Teams Use Machine Learning to Win Races

In Formula 1, milliseconds decide races. The cars generate massive amounts of data, around 400 GB per race from sensors tracking...

mladvocate
Sep 7, 2025 1 min read

Machine Learning in Sports: How AI Predicts NFL Tackles

This is the first post in the “ML in the Wild” series, where we look at specific machine learning applications in...

mladvocate
Jun 14, 2025 1 min read

Because it's Friday

Because It’s Friday: The Music Video Where Physics Wrote the Song

The universe arranges itself into patterns, completely invisible, right in front of us. Every so often someone finds a way to...

mladvocate
Apr 3, 2026 44 sec read

Because it’s Friday: Wrong in Real Time

A nonprofit research group called METR (Model Evaluation & Threat Research) ran a randomized controlled trial earlier this year to measure...

mladvocate
Mar 27, 2026 50 sec read

Because It’s Friday: The Mozzarella Phase

A group of Italian physicists got tired of their cacio e pepe turning clumpy when cooking for big groups, so they...

mladvocate
Mar 19, 2026 55 sec read

Because It’s Friday: Spurious Scholar

Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations has been a beloved corner of the internet since 2014, pairing line charts of things like Nicolas...

mladvocate
Mar 13, 2026 39 sec read

Because It’s Friday: The Animal Fart Database

Somewhere between a Twitter joke and a peer-reviewed research tool lives #DoesItFart, a crowdsourced spreadsheet maintained by biologists cataloging which animals...

mladvocate
Mar 7, 2026 41 sec read

Use Cases and Examples

How I Vibe Coded an AI Assistant for My Blog in One Weekend

Last weekend I built an AI assistant for this blog in about a day, using roughly five dollars of cloud services...

mladvocate
Mar 11, 2026 4 min read

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Hi! 👋 Ask me anything about machine learning and AI! I'll answer using ML Advocate blog posts.