So last week I wrote about using dynamic optimization to understand how we should optimally respond to the global covid-19 crisis. This week, I wanted to take a step back and talk about the python package that made that all possible. It is a nice little package called gekko. As an aside, make sure to…

Last week, I mentioned that even with all of our social distancing efforts, here in the great state of Utah, we would still overwhelm the medical system. It was kind of a bleak grim reminder that we are dealing with the specter of impending death. Fortunately, COVID-19 is no black plague. Deadly, sure. Incurable, at…

I was sitting here, at home, locked away, being socially distant, and I got to thinking, “What is the point?” So I started to read a bunch about the data, and the algorithms, and the point behind social distancing. I’ve got good news, and I’ve got bad news about our new national pass time of…

Over the past few months I’ve had a thought coalescing in my brain. It has been swirling around banging up against the inner portions of my skull. With each collision with my head, and with other ideas, and situations I find myself, this idea has been taking shape. It has been forming into the seeds…

One thing that I have been thinking a lot about since I wrote my chapter on matrix factorization methods, and since I am currently writing a chapter on graph theory is on the idea of a recommendation engine. (If you want to get the book free as I write it click here) They have become…

Yep, we’re going there. Which football team is the best? Well, ask any fan and they are going to tell you that it is their personal favorite. But we are data scientists. Surely, we can do better! And of course, we can. That’s why in this post we will be learning how to use Networkx…

Principal components analysis is all about rotating data. That is all that it does. I know that sounds simple but the algorithm itself is designed to find the best rotation such that most of the variation lies along one axis and the rest of the variation lies along another axis that is perpendicular to the…

In my last blog post, I asked the question, “Can Mia Love hold her congressional seat?” And based off of a single poll, the answer was grim for Mia Love, there is only a one in five shot that she’ll be able to pull off the win. Now, I don’t want to be a naysayer…

So it is election time again, and by and large I ignore politics. I just try to stay out of it, not that I don’t care, but because I don’t want to be seen as being overtly campaigning for one person or another. For context, I live in Utah’s 4th congressional district. My current representative…

Usually, I write a tutorial for other data scientists, or individuals that want to become data scientists. Today, I wanted to write a tutorial for managers that have never hired a data scientist before. Hopefully, my data scientist friends will find value in this tutorial for managers just as informative as they would from learning…