Dear friends,

Welcome to the mid-August issue of the Sunday Briefing. 

We're proud to announce the latest in our string of new webinars. a new webinar series on Why and What If - Causal Inference For Everyone. This new course will continue the exploration of Causal Inference that we've been working through on the blog while diving a bit deeper in some aspects with practical examples and highlighting connections to the broader field of Machine Learning. If you're interested can already sign up for the first edition occurring on Oct 16.

The latest post on our Causal Inference journey is now out and it dives into Chapter 2 with a look at Chains and Forks, two common motifs in Graphical models and explores their consequences. As always you can find all the code in the Causality GitHub or run it directly in the cloud with Binder.  The latest post in the Epidemiology looks at Network Structure, Super-Spreaders and Contact Tracing.  As always, all the code is available in our Epidemiology101 GitHub repository. You can also run the code directly in the cloud with Binder. We hope you find our blog posts useful and continue look forward to your insightful comments. 

We continue our partnership with the wonderful people over at Data Umbrella and highlight two of their upcoming online events: Building a Conversational Bot for WhatsApp w/Twilio & Python on Aug 18 and Create Nimble Data Collection + Reporting Processes on Aug 25. Don't miss them! 

In our regularly scheduled content, we have an Intro to Autoencoders and a quick overview of some of the properties of causal graphs and the fundamental ideas behind Entropy.

On the academic front, we have a Review of Algorithms and Applications of Random Walks, and Surveys on Big Networks and Knowledge integration techniques with Artificial Neural Networks for seq-2-seq/time series models.

Finally, the video of the week, Brandon Foltz provides us with a visual introduction to ANOVA an extremely useful statistical technique that is commonly overlooked by Data Science practitioners.

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Semper discentes,

The D4S team