Over the last few months, you would have seen us experimenting with various formats to aid learning and knowledge exchange among our community members. These formats not only include the blog and the discussion portals, but also the ML competitions, Strategic thinking hackathons, workshops and interactive courses. The idea has been to try various formats and understand what helps our community learn analytics in the best possible manner. While we will continue to try some more interesting formats in the coming months, I wanted to talk specifically about our workshops AV Casino – Introduction to Probability and AV Casino – Introduction to Prbability 2 today.
Why we designed the AV Casino?
Here is an interesting conflict happening in the industry. If you talk to any experienced person in the industry with 5 or more years of experience – they will quote Probability and Statistics as one of the most critical skills for a career in Analytics and Data Science. Here is what Mr. Srikanth Velamakkani, CEO – Fractal Analytics had to say in an exclusive interview we did with them in past:
I recommend analytics aspirants to develop a good understanding of probability and see if they enjoy it
– Mr. Srikanth Velamakkani, CEO, Fractal Analytics
On the other hand, I have met a lot of people early in their analytics career, who seem to think otherwise. A large chunk of people coming from software background tend to pick up machine learning as just an extension to a software code. They tend to skip the basic mathematical and statistical concepts and go on to simply write the code for machine learning algorithms without necessarily understanding the fundamentals. While it might help them in the short term, it definitely comes up as a gap in learning over long term.
The idea behind creating AV Casino was to bring some fun in learning statistics and probability – so that it helps a larger audience. We could have easily written a few articles to explain people about basics of probability. While this would have given us good reach, it would not have been as effective and as much fun as we would have wanted it to be. Hence, we designed AV Casino I and AV Casino II !
Once you have taken the first workshop to go ahead to experience the next level.
Benefits of learning probability through AV Casino:
Probability is one of the most important concepts to learn, if you are serious about a career in Analytics. And learning it in a fun interactive manner would make it even better!
Here are a few things we kept in mind while creating this workshop:
- We wanted to provide bite sized learning to our audience so that you do not get overwhelmed by the mathematical concepts.
- Bringing an interaction based learning so that you are applying the concepts while you are learning them.
- Providing a structured framework for people undergoing this learning rather than covering this in multiple articles, which might be difficult to track among other articles.
And guess what, we think this is just the start of an interesting series. In future, we plan to do series of workshops as an extension to this workshop, which would include topics like Conditional Probability, Hypothesis Testing, Markov chains etc.
Agenda of AV Casino
Without stealing too much of thunder from the workshop, here is the agenda of the workshop:
- Getting ready for the AV Casino
- Basics of Probability
- Addition and multiplication rule
- Over-counting and Inclusion-Exclusion principle
- Complements, Bose-Einstein, Inclusion-Exclusion
- Main Villains
- End Notes
As you can see, the agenda starts from basics, builds up slowly and ends up with some of the most thought provoking problems in probability. I don’t want to sound like I am boasting, but I have not seen such lucid content on this topic elsewhere!
Looking forward to your feedback:
As usual, whenever we launch something, we look out to hear from you. That is the only way we learn how our content and tutorials are doing! So, I would request you to spend some time going through AV Casino I & AV Casino II and provide us with your valuable feedback through the comments below. I would be looking out to hear from you.
Finally, thank you Mr. Rabbit!
I would like to thank our intern Prasanna for giving shape to this idea. Prasanna is one of the most curious mind I have seen, when it comes to understanding of human psychology and logic behind it. He is an avid reader and an impeccable fielder on a cricket field. He can be found in deep thoughts on his seat in AV House any day!
You are free to question him about his pseudonym B.Rabbit 🙂
Kunal is a post graduate from IIT Bombay in Aerospace Engineering. He has spent more than 10 years in field of Data Science. His work experience ranges from mature markets like UK to a developing market like India. During this period he has lead teams of various sizes and has worked on various tools like SAS, SPSS, Qlikview, R, Python and Matlab.
