Bolashak Fellows at Johns Hopkins SAIS · Two-Day Seminar 2026
Day 1 · Machine learning

Day 1 · Machine Learning for Governance Data

Prediction on governance data with decision trees, random forests, and neural networks — taught on the GOV datasets and run entirely in claude.ai. Each session ends with cases, a self-check quiz, and a clickable resource table (R2D3, StatQuest, ISLR, ViEWS).

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Schedule
9:00–9:40
Day1a

Why ML for policy researchers?

Prediction vs. causation; Kleinberg's umbrella test; live first look at GOV; visual investigation; mapping your research to ML tasks.

9:45–10:40
Day1b

Decision trees (CART)

Splits and Gini by worked example; overfitting and its cures; one-prompt tree on military spending; interpretation drill.

10:45–11:00

Break

11:00–12:00
Day1c

Random forests

Why many trees usually beat one; importance & partial dependence (and why neither is causal); forest vs. tree, live.

1:00–2:20
Day1d

Lab 1 · Hands-on ML in claude.ai

Six prompted tasks in pairs: interrogate, tree, forest, regression, break-the-model experiments, and a check — with a troubleshooting table and prompt log.

2:20–2:35

Break

2:35–3:35
Day1e

Neural networks

Layers, loss, early stopping; a small neural network on GOV; when networks win vs. forests.

3:40–4:30
Day1f

Lab 2 · The model shoot-out

Tree vs. forest vs. NN on one split; deployment role-play; the UK exam-algorithm case.

4:35–5:00
Day1g

When models govern

Unequal errors; drift, feedback, Goodhart, automation bias; Dutch benefits & COMPAS; framework preview.

Morning 9:00–12:00 · Afternoon 1:00–5:00 · Two labs, two synthesis sessions. Head to the Labs page to run the prompts in Claude.

Slides · download