Using Data Takes Discipline – “It’s like saying, I gave Stacy a pen, therefore she’s a journalist,” said ZestFinance CEO Douglas Merrill at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference this March. We’re not automatically great decision makers just because we’re looking at data…. | |
Discovering Variable Interactions Using Particle Swarm and Apache Spark – I’ve been exploring whether particle swarm optimization — a higher-complexity genetic algorithm, but computationally accessible in a distributed computing environment — will enhance the predictive power of ordinary least squares regression…. | |
Paper Replication: The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market – David Autor and David Dorn are known for their research into (among many topics) the polarization of the U.S. labor market, sometimes also referred to… as the hollowing out of the middle class…. I attempted to replicate one of their central papers to get a sense for its robustness…. | |
Visualization and Predictive Modeling Using D3.js – Several tools exist for creating visualizations: Tableau, Shiny, Bokeh, D3 to name a few…. One reason I like D3 is that it’s capable of depicting the simulated outcomes of complex user scenarios–scenarios that might not even exist in one’s historical data…. |