Description

What happens when a Data Scientist and a University Statistician go head-to-head in a rap battle?

At the data analytics company Alteryx, the staff and product team were fascinated by the subtle but important rivalry between private industry uses of data science vs the rigorous academic standards of published statistics.

How important is it to understand the inner workings of a model, if it produces astonishingly accurate results? Is there an inherent tradeoff between interpretability and functionality, or is the appearance of that tradeoff just an artifact of our currently limited state of knowledge?

So the Alteryx marketing team turned to Baba Brinkman to create an epic rap battle video based on their internal discussions, furnishing the academic articles and popular science links necessary to bring him up to speed on this highly-relevant but admittedly niche debate.

The resulting video, produced just over a year before Event Rap was founded, has received more than 115K views on YouTube with more than 100 fully-engaged comments, many from industry insiders who resonate with the conflict.

To see more of the engagement from the Data Science community, see this viral LinkedIn post from Marijn Markus.