Start Here    

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

Machine Learning is everywhere. It decides which loan applications get approved, which medical scans get flagged for review, which play an...
mladvocate
Sep 28, 2024 1 min read

Foundations    

What Is a Machine Learning Video Model?

When you type a prompt into Runway or Sora and a video clip appears, no existing footage was found or assembled....
mladvocate
Apr 25, 2026 3 min read

Why Learn Machine Learning in the Age of AI

AI and machine learning have never been more accessible. No-code AI platforms, prebuilt agents, and foundation models you can call with...
mladvocate
Apr 14, 2026 2 min read

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

Mental Models    

What is Feature Engineering in Machine Learning?

Feature engineering sounds more technical than it is. In machine learning, it means turning raw data into useful inputs for a...
mladvocate
May 11, 2026 5 min read

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

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    

How Lionsgate Revealed the Limits of Fine-Tuning in Machine Learning

In September 2024, Lionsgate announced a partnership with AI video company Runway to fine-tune a machine learning model on the studio’s...
mladvocate
Apr 25, 2026 3 min read

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 Science of Optimal Laziness

In 2022, two researchers published a paper modeling the mathematically ideal amount of effort to exert when you don’t want to...
mladvocate
May 8, 2026 35 sec read

Because It’s Friday: On Missing Data Sets

Mimi Onuoha is an artist and researcher who keeps a running list of data that should exist but doesn’t: poverty statistics...
mladvocate
May 1, 2026 31 sec read

Because it’s Friday: Your AI Slop Bores Me

A 17-year-old in Puducherry, India built a fake AI chatbot in March 2026. It’s a text box where real humans answer...
mladvocate
Apr 24, 2026 37 sec read

Because it’s Friday: A Million Random Digits

In 1955, the RAND Corporation published a book called “A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates.” This is exactly what...
mladvocate
Apr 18, 2026 43 sec read

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

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

All Stories

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

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

Training vs Testing Data: ML Models Must Prove Themselves

Does this sound familiar? You’re tutoring a student for an upcoming math test. You help them solve dozens of practice problems...
mladvocate
Mar 30, 2025 5 min read

Inference vs Prediction in Machine Learning: What’s the Difference?

Some machine learning applications can make accurate recommendations but can’t explain the reasoning. Others provide clear explanations but aren’t quite as...
mladvocate
Mar 22, 2025 2 min read

Classification vs Regression: Predicting What vs. How Much

In our previous post, we explored supervised vs. unsupervised learning. Now we’re diving into another fundamental choice you’ll face in every...
mladvocate
Feb 28, 2025 5 min read

Supervised vs Unsupervised Learning in Machine Learning: What the Names Don’t Tell You

Remember learning to ride a bike? Some of us had a parent running alongside, holding the seat and shouting guidance: “Pedal...
mladvocate
Feb 15, 2025 5 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

Explore →

Because it's Friday Foundations Mathematics and Statistics Mental Models ML in the Wild Start Here Tips and Tricks Use Cases and Examples
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