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 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 aspect of D3 I appreciate is how one can use it to depict the simulated outcomes of complex user scenarios — future scenarios that might not even exist in one’s data…. |