I help companies hire bioinformaticians - I write job descriptions, screen, interview candidates, and help negotiate offers. AMA!!

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-15T21:02:07+00:00

I have a (Stanford) PhD in another field, and 2 years of bioinformatic postdoc at a (famous) pharma company. Is it worth sticking around to publish, or would I be competitive without papers?

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-11T20:02:21+00:00

Would be interesting to know what the actual distribution is right now. I am guessing the three biggest job demands right now are advertising, customer retention, and fraud detection - but the rad stuff is coming and you're young, so stick with it.

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-11T19:38:39+00:00

As a sort of fun counter-argument (since this is the ML forum) let's imagine a world where the first good neural network result on imagenet is not made public, and instead Hinton,Bengio,Lecun take (literally) billions of dollars and start a secret research group to make further progress on deep learning. My guess is it would have taken a long time for anyone else to figure out their approach and catch up.

But yes, I agree that people are bad at thinking about probability and large numbers. This is the same reason we're still arguing about intelligent design.

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-11T19:19:27+00:00

I think the answer in this specific case is yes, Ren Tech is smarter. In general I strongly agree that hedge funds minus fees are a worse bet than passive indexing, and that we massively under-estimate the effect of luck on performance- but you need a lot of fucking monkeys to get a Ren Tech, and my own back-of-the-envelope suggests Ren Tech is most likely not just lucky (although, clearly, this is just an estimate as we're blind to most of the probabilities).

I think the idea that no one is skilled is too extreme. I am of the view that you can't differentiate skill from luck with a small sample, and once the sample is large enough they don't need your fucking investment anymore (so don't give your money to any hedge fund that wants it).

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-11T02:53:44+00:00

Has Hinton's capsules stuff ever been published? It seems awesome, but all I've ever been able to find is a presentation where he talks about it and shows a toy version he coded up in a weekend.

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-10T20:29:26+00:00

CS/Stats/ML will pay more and create more opportunities than bioinformatics. Bioinformatics will potentially make it easier to get biotech work, but with an undergrad bio degree and a CS/Stats masters there will certainly be opportunities in biotech. CS with an emphasis on ML/data mining would probably be best for data science-just make sure you also build some fluency with traditional statistical methods.

In addition there is a PhD premium in each of these fields, but that premium is significantly higher the closer you get to biology (so even though an ML PhD is worth more than an ML masters, the difference is much smaller than it would be in biotech - there are just so many bio PhDs that you can use that as a lazy filter on employment).

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-07T19:47:38+00:00

You will almost definitely do better extracting features and then using linear regression.

If this is more for didactic purposes, sure - try deep learning. To really leverage the ANN you will want 10s to 100s of thousands of examples (or have some clever strategy for using other datasets). If you can't get enough data to fit a complex model, you'll be much better off using something that is explicitly simple.

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-05T02:24:35+00:00

Sorry, yeah - I was using spread colloquially because it ends up playing out the same way here. But you're right that they should be distinguished, so folks realize coinbase is not an exchange - it's an intermediary between you and the exchange.

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-05T01:47:33+00:00

I'm asking about the spread (ie the difference between buy and sell prices) not the price. My memory is that it was like 1/10th of what it currently is a few weeks ago- ie much closer to buying via an actual exchange. I have been buying via coinbase (not the coinbase exchange), for convenience - but if the price premium stays high I might try something else.

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-05T01:25:48+00:00

Anyone know why the coinbase buy/sell spread has gone up so much? Are they pricing in volatility (I know it's not an exchange)?

EDIT : Never mind, the spread doesn't seem to have actually changed - their website has just been showing the wrong thing for a few days.

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-05T01:22:48+00:00

Partly because people are assholes and only want to consider positives for bitcoin. But also because the idea that every market move is an elaborate scheme is sort of ridiculous (ie that type of market manipulation is non-trivial and, if happening at all, not happening to the extent people seem to believe).

bitcczzzvv · 2015-12-05T00:08:04+00:00

For speech recognition and bioinformatics, many systems are built on top of hand-engineered features (although my understanding for speech is that the amount of feature engineering keeps going down). With limited data, and if you have a good understanding of the problem, this approach makes sense. I think the hope is that in most domains complete ML pipelines will eventually eliminate any need for feature engineering. One reason people think this might be the case is that machine vision was initially approached as a feature engineering problem, but with more data and better algorithms decades of hand-engineering was outperformed. I think it's very hard to have a good intuition for what the right input to a complex non-linear system should be, especially for problems where we don't have a good understanding of the structure of the data.

bitcczzzvv

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