Pitfalls to avoid for new data scientists — Build a project portfolio. Arguably the most pervasive advice in data science. Listening to the excellent Build a Career in Data Science Podcast, I was surprised to learn few people heed this advice. A portfolio showcases your interests, skills and abilities to reason about data. It can convince a hiring…

Let’s do better — “Let’s order Thai.” “Great, what’s your go-to dish?” “Pad Thai.” This has bugged me for years. Pad Thai shouldn’t be your first choice of Thai food. Like Turkey on Thanksgiving, most Pad Thai is overrated. Instead of a bang, it’s a whimper. There, I said it. Pad Thai was created…

Using R to visualize disparities in student debt and college attainment — Data suggests student debt bites twice. First, stalling wealth creation. Second, if it prevents people from finishing college, this further sets back wealth creation. Previously, I examined differences in college degree attainment, between White, Black and Hispanic Americans. The Widening Gap [1] lead to a hypothesis: Wealth inequality is positively…

In light of recent euphoria, here’s a compelling bear case. I’m bullish Bitcoin and Ethereum. And any technology to redistribute power, resist censorship and preserve privacy. In light of the current crypto euphoria, I’d like to entertain the best bear case I’ve heard. Paraphrasing Demetri Kofinas, host of Hidden Forces: …

Using R and Python to visualize the relationship between Market Cap and Hourly Cost to Attack Overview In this post, I use Python and R to access, parse, manipulate, then visualize data from Crypto51.app to show the strong relationship between Market Capitalization and Cost to Attack among public crypto networks. The…

Rule-based Sentiment Analysis Using Python and R — Overview Why Sentiment Analysis? NLP is subfield of linguistic, computer science and artificial intelligence (wiki), and you could spend years studying it. However, I wanted a quick dive to a get an intuition for how NLP works, and we’ll do that via sentiment analysis, categorizing text by their polarity. We can’t help but feel…

Use R to find out which metrics drive people to click on your profile — Overview & Setup This post uses various R libraries and functions to help you explore your Twitter Analytics Data. The first thing to do is download data from analytics.twitter.com. The assumption here is that you’re already a Twitter user and have been using for at least 6 months. Once there, you’ll click on…

Using code to develop a feel for how machine learning optimization works — Overview In this post, we’ll explore Gradient Descent from the ground up starting conceptually, then using code to build up our intuition brick by brick. While this post is part of an ongoing series where I document my progress through Data Science from Scratch by Joel Grus, for this post I…

Exploring the BBC’s Top 100 Influential Women of 2020 with interactive plots — Overview This is a quick walk through of using the sunburstR package to create sunburst plots in R. The original document is written in RMarkdown, which is an interactive version of markdown. The following code can be run in RMarkdown or an R script. …