Statistics podcasts

INRIA researcher David Holzmüller explains how to choose among tabular foundation models, boosted trees and multilayer perceptrons. He discusses TabArena, TabICL and RealMLP, benchmark weaknesses, small-data performance, calibration and class imbalance. The conversation also examines text columns, explainability, time-series distinctions, synthetic pretraining and the trade-offs among computation, inference speed and predictive performance. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush. Watch the full conversation on the publisher’s YouTube channel.

Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush

Florian Brand of Prime Intellect discusses how to evaluate agents when their tools and execution environments affect the result. The episode examines benchmark gaming, preventing shortcuts around scoring rules and the statistical limits of expensive evaluation runs. It also asks whether subjective impressions of reliability can be translated into useful measurements of model behavior. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush. Watch the full conversation on the publisher’s YouTube channel.

Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv, Allen Roush

Jo Røislien discusses research on communicating expert information and lessons from public communication during the pandemic. Conversation in Norwegian.

Steven Strogatz and Harvard mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood explore what counts as evidence in number theory before a rigorous proof is available. Their discussion examines how probability and randomness guide conjectures about prime numbers and infinite collections, and how probabilistic patterns can lead mathematicians toward certainty.

Hosted by Steven Strogatz

Jo Røislien discusses statistics in medicine and the challenge of explaining quantitative science to broad audiences. Conversation in Norwegian.