#57 Forecasting French Elections, with… Mystery Guest

Learning Bayesian Statistics

No, no, don't leave! You did not click on the wrong button. You are indeed on Alex Andorra’s podcast. The podcast that took the Bayesian world by a storm: “Learning Bayesian Statistics”, and that Barack Obama deemed “the best podcast in the whole galaxy” – or maybe Alex said that, I don’t remember.

Alex made us discover new methods, new ideas, and mostly new people. But what do we really know about him? Does he even really exist? To find this out I put on my Frenchest beret, a baguette under my arm, and went undercover to try to find him.

And I did ! So today for a special episode I, Rémi Louf, will be the one asking questions and making bad jokes with a French accent.

Before letting him in, here’s what I got on him so far.

By day, Alex is a Bayesian modeler at the PyMC Labs consultancy. By night, he doesn’t (yet) fight crime but he’s an open-source enthusiast and core contributor to PyMC and ArviZ.

An always-learning statistician, Alex loves building models and studying elections and human behavior.

When he’s not working, he loves hiking, exercising, meditating and reading nerdy books and novels. He also loves chocolate a bit too much, but he doesn’t like talking about it – he prefers eating it.

Our theme music is « Good Bayesian », by Baba Brinkman (feat MC Lars and Mega Ran). Check out his awesome work at https://bababrinkman.com/ !

Thank you to my Patrons for making this episode possible!

Yusuke Saito, Avi Bryant, Ero Carrera, Giuliano Cruz, Tim Gasser, James Wade, Tradd Salvo, Adam Bartonicek, William Benton, Alan O'Donnell, Mark Ormsby, James Ahloy, Robin Taylor, Thomas Wiecki, Chad Scherrer, Nathaniel Neitzke, Zwelithini Tunyiswa, Elea McDonnell Feit, Bertrand Wilden, James Thompson, Stephen Oates, Gian Luca Di Tanna, Jack Wells, Matthew Maldonado, Ian Costley, Ally Salim, Larry Gill, Joshua Duncan, Ian Moran, Paul Oreto, Colin Caprani, George Ho, Colin Carroll, Nathaniel Burbank, Michael Osthege, Rémi Louf, Clive Edelsten, Henri Wallen, Hugo Botha, Vinh Nguyen, Raul Maldonado, Marcin Elantkowski, Adam C. Smith, Will Kurt, Andrew Moskowitz, Hector Munoz, Marco Gorelli, Simon Kessell, Bradley Rode, Patrick Kelley, Rick Anderson, Casper de Bruin, Philippe Labonde, Matthew McAnear, Michael Hankin, Cameron Smith, Luis Iberico, Tomáš Frýda, Ryan Wesslen, Andreas Netti, Riley King, Aaron Jones, Yoshiyuki Hamajima, Sven De Maeyer, Michael DeCrescenzo, Fergal M, Mason Yahr, Naoya Kanai, Steven Rowland and Aubrey Clayton.

Visit https://www.patreon.com/learnbayesstats to unlock exclusive Bayesian swag ;)

Links from the show:

• Alex on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alex_andorra
• Alex on GitHub: https://github.com/AlexAndorra
• Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aandorra-pollsposition/
• Intuitive Bayes Introductory Course: https://www.intuitivebayes.com/
• PyMC Labs consultancy: https://www.pymc-labs.io/
• PollsPosition GitHub repository: https://github.com/pollsposition
• French Presidents' popularity dashboard: https://www.pollsposition.com/popularity
• Learning Bayesian Statistics YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAwVseuhVrpJFfik_cMHrhQ
• Love the podcast? Leave a review on Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/learning-bayesian-statistics-932588