Abstract: 

Bayesian modeling is an extremely powerful tool in solving data science problems across different domains. And while user-friendly modeling packages like PyMC3 exist, understanding the underlying concepts still provides a challenge for many newcomers. The main reason is that usually, statistics is taught by statisticians who provide formulas with little regard for intuition. In this talk I will take the opposite approach: throw all math out the window and explain the underlying concepts in an intuitive way.

Bio: 

Thomas Wiecki is the Chief Executive Officer at PyMC Labs (www.pymc-labs.io), the world's first Bayesian consultancy. Prior to that Thomas was the VP of Data Science at Quantopian, where he used probabilistic programming and machine learning to help build the world’s first crowdsourced hedge fund. He is an author of the popular PyMC3 package — a probabilistic programming framework written in Python. He holds a PhD from Brown University.