Author Archives: asmith2729

What are we doing here In Part1 of this series I talked about visting the sites of the National Parks system and trying to find a complete list of all sites and where they were. Since I couldn’t find what I was looking for I built a web scraper in Python that crawled across NPS.govContinue reading “Building an Interactive National Parks Map (Part 2)”

What are we doing here? The United States has one of the largest national park systems in the world with hundreds of sites. While the sixty-three parks themselves are what people first think of there are also national monuments, historical sites and more that fall under the NPS. The NPS sells a passport-like booklet thatContinue reading “Building an Interactive National Parks Map (Part 1)”

“We can check that in our Hyperdimensional Data Cube” If you’re looking for lingo that sounds fancy, makes you look smart and creates and air of mystery about data it’s hard to top a phrase like “Hyperdimensional Data Cube”. What exactly is it? How did your numbers come out of it? Well boss, it’s hardContinue reading “Data Cubes Are Just Like Excel”

Random Forest Models: A Summary of Ensemble Learning and Decision Trees A powerful new technique that organizations are adopting is the Random Forest methodology of classifying and predicting their data. Let’s walk through what it means if you hear about a random forest model. This approach is a form of ensemble modeling which means itContinue reading “Random Forestry”

The Basics of SQL (And Why Amateurs Need to Know It) Data science is full of different ways to solve the same problems. This is true from the approaches and methods you choose to the languages you code those methods into. When you’re new to the field it’s natural to try to figure out whichContinue reading “SQL Basics”

If you work long enough at a big enough organization you will come across formal “project management”. Perhaps the place you work will be large enough that there are people whose entire job is ‘project manager’ or (after a while) ‘program manager’. At first this can feel confusing or even intimidating, especially if you haven’tContinue reading “Project Management – More Than a Job Title”

Let’s talk today about the most important soft skill you can grow, one that benefits you no matter how deeply into data science you dive, change management. Our field would be simple if people changed how they do something just because they were presented with facts and analysis. Instead, if you want your work toContinue reading “Change Management for Data Science”

I’ve found that some of the best data scientists don’t spend enough time on how to communicate their results to a group. They don’t know how to give an effective presentation. We’re going to fix that today. While this site celebrates self-learning you shouldn’t feel like an Amateur when you’re standing in front of aContinue reading “How to Give Any Presentation”

The Normal Curve One of the most fundamental concepts in statistics is the normal distribution. It’s often referred to as the bell curve in more informal conversations. Conversely, you may hear it called ‘Gaussian’ in more academic settings. These are all the same concept. Today’s article will make us Amateurs in the Normal Distribution. SpecificallyContinue reading “Finding Oddities with the Normal Distribution”

Predicting The Future One of the core concepts in Data Science is predictive analytics. You can predict the future – what’s not to love? How powerful is that? Today we’ll dip our toes in the ocean that is predictive analytics by starting with the linear regression line. By the end not only will you talkContinue reading “Regression Lines (Without The Math)”