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… Continue reading Bayes’ Rule and Combining Data From Different Polls
Can Mia Love Hold Her Seat?
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… Continue reading Can Mia Love Hold Her Seat?
How to Hire My First Data Scientist
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… Continue reading How to Hire My First Data Scientist
Reverse Image Lookup Out Of The Box
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… Continue reading Reverse Image Lookup Out Of The Box
Learning About Fashion With A Convolutional Neural Network
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… Continue reading Learning About Fashion With A Convolutional Neural Network
I Fell In Love With Google Colab
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… Continue reading I Fell In Love With Google Colab
March Madness Predicted Upsets 2018
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… Continue reading March Madness Predicted Upsets 2018
Fourier Transforms, Fraud, and Fun
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… Continue reading Fourier Transforms, Fraud, and Fun
Box-Cox Transforms and Other Nonparametric Normalization Methods
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… Continue reading Box-Cox Transforms and Other Nonparametric Normalization Methods
Publishing a Bokeh App to Heroku
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… Continue reading Publishing a Bokeh App to Heroku