The winner of the Numbersense Book Quiz has been announced. See here. GOOD NEWS: McGraw-Hill is sponsoring another quiz. Same format. Another chance to win a signed book. Click here to go directly to the quiz. *** I did a...
The winner of the Numbersense Book Quiz has been announced. See here. GOOD NEWS: McGraw-Hill is sponsoring another quiz. Same format. Another chance to win a signed book. Click here to go directly to the quiz. *** I did a...
I generated a big data set when writing Chapter 8 of Numbersense. This chapter discusses the question of how to measure your skills in managing/coaching a fantasy sports team. The general statistical question is how to separately measure two factors...
Introduction Continuing my recent series on exploratory data analysis (EDA), today’s post focuses on histograms, which are very useful plots for visualizing the distribution of a data set. I will discuss how histograms are constructed and use histograms to assess the distribution of the “Ozone” data from the built-in “airquality” data set in R. In […]
I will never understand why people believe Snapchat when they say the photos would disappear after a set time. Nothing digital ever really disappears. It is long known that deleting a file on your PC does not eliminate it. It is also known that the entire Internet Protocal (IP) is based on replication--copies of the same file can be found on a lot of servers. My colleague showed me this…
I don't do much GIS but I like to. It's rather enjoyable and involves a tremendous skill set. Often you will find your self grabbing data sets from some site, scraping, data cleaning and reshaping, and graphing. On the ride … Continue reading →
TechCrunch has a great piece on how Facebook tracks you even if you don't give them data. (link; be careful, opening this link drags my browser to a crawl.) Here's my take on the issue: I have always been disturbed by the complicity of invading other people's privacy, forced upon us when we use a service like Facebook (or Google or you name it). For those of you who allow…
Introduction Continuing my recent series on exploratory data analysis (EDA), and following up on the last post on the conceptual foundations of empirical cumulative distribution functions (CDFs), this post shows how to plot them in R. (Previous posts in this series on EDA include descriptive statistics, box plots, kernel density estimation, and violin plots.) I […]
Introduction Continuing my recent series on exploratory data analysis (EDA), this post focuses on the conceptual foundations of empirical cumulative distribution functions (CDFs); in a separate post, I will show how to plot them in R. (Previous posts in this series include descriptive statistics, box plots, kernel density estimation, and violin plots.) To give you […]
Predictive Analytics by Eric Siegel (link) was published earlier this year. Siegel is a consultant and organizer of a series of popular industry conferences, which I attend with some regularity. I recommend this book for readers who want to understand the current state of “data science” at a deeper level than the New York Times’s but still nonmathematical. If you want to measure against my own writing, then Siegel spends…
One of the unlikely areas in which data science has played a role is employee management. New York Times has an informative interview with Laszlo Bock, an SVP at Google. (link). Here's Bock on the famous brainteasers used in Google interviews: On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in…
