What is a reverse image search? It is where you give me an image and I find a bunch of images that look like the one that you gave me. So, I thought that I would give that a quick try. But I am out of time to train one from scratch. So I decided…

So for the past week or so I have been working on a model, a convolutional neural network to participate in a kaggle competition. I have been developing it on google’s colab project. See my last post to get an idea about what google colab is all about. Anyway, this is a fashion style prediction…

So forgive my kind of sporadic posting, I’ve been trying to keep to at least a biweekly schedule since I am living with a newborn. The whole new baby thing makes writing posts for this blog really tough. So since it is super late and I need to get some sleep soon, I wanted to…

If you have read my blog since last year you know that back in August I put together my ideas for an algorithm which would predict the outcome of the March Madness tournament. Well, Selection Sunday came this week and I’ve been putting together my brackets using it. So the question on everyone’s mind is…

I recently backwards engineered the algorithm that some unsavory characters were using to brute force find real credit card numbers and fraudulently charge them. The backbone to reverse engineering their algorithm was the Fourier Transform. I think that this is probably one of the most useful mathematical concepts that I ever learned. It falls right…

So that is a bit of a snarky title. Today, I want to talk about techniques that you can use to transform non-normal data into a distribution that makes way more sense. This can be useful for all kinds of analysis like time-series I deal with non-normal data a lot. In fact, I’ve come to…

This is the last of three posts. In the first post we did some really fun Bayesian modeling. Specifically, we built a longitudinal or panel data model using a Bayesian model with fixed effects for states and time. And what we found was that increasing the cigarette tax would decrease health care expenditures in a…

My first order of business is to announce the winner of my Christmas giveaway. This past Christmas, I was running a giveaway for some free time to spend with me for some data science coaching and a fifty dollar gift card. I want to say thank you to everyone that participated. It was awesome. I…

Last post, I created a model that would predict what effect changing the taxes on cigarettes would have on health care expenditures. That model was fun to build, but it is difficult to get a feel for what is going on. Even though it is a relatively simple model. Humans tend to be fairly visual…

Cigarette Taxes TL;DR Raising the cigarette tax by one cent in every state will save us about $1 billion per year. In the grand scheme of health care costs, it isn’t that much money. So with this post, I wanted to get back to my roots as an economist. I decided that I wanted to…