Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Johari: Machine learning prediction is correlation, but business decisions require causation

Ramesh Johari · Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor) · Nov 9, 2023 · at 34:24

Stanford professor Ramesh Johari explains why marketplace data scientists must move beyond predictive machine learning models to causal analysis when optimizing business decisions.

0:00 / 0:12exact quote · 12.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“When we teach people to build machine learning models, we're asking them to make predictions. We're asking them to find correlations. Prediction is inherently about correlation. But when we ask people to make decisions, we're asking them to think about causation.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Ramesh Johari

Insight
Johari: Marketplaces never start by solving two-sided matchmaking friction
“The moral is a marketplace business never starts as a marketplace business, because what we think of as a marketplace business is something which at scale is removing the friction of the two sides finding each other. But when you start, you don't have that sca…”
Ramesh Johari Nov 9, 2023 ▶ 15:07 Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor)
Insight
Johari: AI puts more pressure on human data scientists, not less
“What AI has done for us is it's massively expanded the frontier of things we could think about our problem, hypotheses we could have, maybe things we could test. It's just an astronomical explosion of explanations and ideas and principle. And I really think ac…”
Ramesh Johari Nov 9, 2023 ▶ 1:09:48 Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor)
Opinion
Johari: OpenAI has evolved into a marketplace via plugins
“No one in their right mind would have thought of open AI as a marketplace. But OpenAI is a marketplace now. They may not want to call themselves a marketplace, but they have plugins. The plugins are flooding that, that platform.”
Ramesh Johari Nov 9, 2023 ▶ 17:33 Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Johari: Virtually every modern tech business will have the option to become a marketplace
“Virtually every business is going to have that option at some point in, in, you know, the modern tech enabled economy anyway.”
Ramesh Johari Nov 9, 2023 ▶ 25:31 Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor)
Insight
Johari: Experimentation cultures foster risk aversion and overly incremental testing
“What I generally believe is that we're risk averse on both these two dimensions. That what people decide to test in a world that has promoted experimentation for everything tends to be more incremental by design. Okay. Because, and we'll come back to by actual…”
Ramesh Johari Nov 9, 2023 ▶ 41:38 Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor)
Insight
Johari: Single A/B tests should not overturn core business understanding
“Data science is really about accumulation of evidence. It's never about one finding an isolation. And so another kind of trap, I think, is to sometimes say, well, I hit stat sig on my AB test, you know, green light, it's all go like, and, you know, I think, yo…”
Ramesh Johari Nov 9, 2023 ▶ 47:30 Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.