Assertion certainty 5/5 debate potential 1/5

Jordan explains traditional statistical bootstrap fails to scale on terabyte datasets

Michael Jordan · Michael Jordan · Jul 28, 2017 · at 18:35

Michael Jordan, computer science and statistics professor at UC Berkeley, explains why classic bootstrap resampling methods cannot scale in modern distributed cloud architecture.

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“Okay, but, gotcha, big gotcha, which is you can't do this on a terabyte of data, alright, because each resampling of the original data set on, if you have a terabyte, it's about 632 gigabytes. So you're sitting there on your terabyte of data at a central computer, You sample with replacement a few thousands of times, that's what you need to do, and you get these 632 gigabyte data sets, thousands of them, you're sending on your network to get out to your machines. Hopeless. Way too slow. Alright, so our big principle in statistics, which is, really is the bootstrap of how to get error bars in some generality without priors, just can't, it doesn't scale.”

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