What's in a Name?
An interactive estimator for whether a first name is old, new, making a comeback, going out of style, and how popular it is.
toban@web:~$ whoami
Toban Wiebe
I lead AI/ML/DS at Keeper, where we're building an automated AI matchmaking system for high-throughput marriage formation. My academic background is in economics (UPenn PhD) where my research focused on equilibrium search and matching models applied to marriage markets.
Stuff I'm excited about: matching markets, Bayesian inference, keyboard-driven interfaces, AI & robots, Starship, and tools that make careful thinking easier.
writing
Essays.
- Use eCDFs instead of histograms Histograms are familiar, but empirical CDFs are usually a better default for visualizing distributions: no bin widths, easy percentiles, and better behavior in the tails.
- Stop worrying about class imbalance Data scientists worry too much about class imbalance in classifier training sets. If you care about calibrated probabilities, log loss already handles the imbalance correctly.
- Quantifying uncertainty in probability predictions Suppose you're interested in knowing the chances of an event X occuring (e.g., X = " a nuclear strike over any populated area in the year 2019 "). When making predictions a...
bits
Short posts.
- New essay: Use eCDFs instead of histograms Histograms make you fiddle with bin widths, hide percentiles, and handle tails badly. eCDFs avoid all three problems.
- New mini-app for name analytics: What's in a Name? I made a fun data app that guesses whether a name feels old, new, rising, or fading.
- New essay: Stop worrying about class imbalance Class imbalance is mostly a non-issue.
- Quantifying uncertainty in probability predictions Suppose you're interested in knowing the chances of an event X occuring (e.g., X = " a nuclear strike over any populated area in the year 2019 "). When making predictions a...
selected work
Models, tools, and habits.
Dotfiles
Configuration for a keyboard-first Linux shell, editor, and window-manager setup.
MarriageMarkets.jl
A Julia package for solving equilibria in marriage-market models.
links