In this defence of heuristics, I examine how simple solutions can often be the best port of call when looking to ship data science products — In 2016, Lisa Bodell — the CEO of futurethink and a top speaker at Google events — proposed that “simplicity is fast becoming the advantage of our time”. …

Everything you need to know about quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs), including the benefits and limitations of these approaches compared to classical computing methods — In recent years investment in quantum computing has increased significantly, with quantum approaches to areas such as security and network communication expected to upend existing classical computing techniques. Researchers such as Garg and Ramakrishnan identify that at its core, quantum computing aims to “solve classically intractable problems through computationally cheaper…

Why common pre-processing activities can actually harm the power of VADER and why it’s important to consider your NLP pipeline carefully — VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) is a popular sentiment analysis tool developed by CJ Hutto and Eric Gilbert which has a number of uses in both research and live applications. …

Survival analysis is a relatively under-utilised range of statistical methods that are highly applicable in a range of fields including marketing analytics. Broadly speaking, survival analysis is used to analyse the expected amount of time for an event to happen. Within the field of biostatistics, survival analysis is typically used…

Optimized Row Columnar, or ORC, is an column-oriented data storage format, that is part of the Apache Hadoop family. …

A short introduction to the AdaBoost algorithm — In this post, we will cover a very brief introduction to boosting algorithms, as well as delve under the hood of a popular boosting algorithm, AdaBoost. The purpose of this post is to provide a gentle introduction to some of the key concepts of boosting and AdaBoost. …

When working with data in R, you might want to convert numeric values into factors for easier exploratory data analysis or model building. You might also wish to control the order of factors, if the default chosen by R isn’t satisfactory. In this blog post, I’ll cover both use cases. Changing numeric values to factors …

(or thereabouts). Using Repl.it’s Cloud Environment to Analyse and Share Meteorite Landings Data in Minutes One of the biggest challenges in data science development today is quickly sharing, developing and deploying code. Unless you’re working within a business where data science & analytics is deeply embedded within the company culture and ecosystem (and Github), chances are you’ve experienced the fun of email chains…

A (Very) Quick Primer on Descriptive Statistics When computing descriptive statistics and summaries of our dataset, we will often publish the following: Mean: A calculated central value in the dataset Median: A value lying at the midpoint of the dataset Mode: The most frequently occurring value in the dataset Range: Difference between largest & smallest values in…