This week, here’s another map: a map of world oil production that you can create using R.
As I’ve mentioned, projects like this – a few hundred lines of code, with a variety of functions from the tidyverse – are excellent practice for intermediate data scientists.
To become a great data scientist, you need to master data visualization. One intermediate topic that you’ll need to learn is how to work with color. Specifically, you’ll need to learn how to manipulate the “fill” color of things like density plots …
In this post, I want to walk you through the logic of building a map, step by step …
How many data science books have you read? 5? 10? A few dozen? How many free online courses have you taken? A few? How many blog posts have you read? (I’d be willing to bet: you’ve read dozens.) If you’re like most budding data scientists, you’ve probably consumed a lot of material. You probably even … Read more
The world has just entered one of the biggest transitions in history. That’s the contention of two MIT economists, Eric Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee. In their recent book, The Second Machine Age, they argue that big data, computation, and innovation are changing our economy and institutions with a magnitude greater than almost anything ever seen … Read more
A few weeks ago, an acquaintance told me that he was interested in getting started with machine learning. He’s a web developer who primarily works in Ruby and Python, but also has a small amount of experience with R. Day-to-day, his work is run-of-the-mill web development, and he’s confessed to me that he’s a bit … Read more
In my last article, I stated that for practitioners (as opposed to theorists), the real prerequisite for machine learning is data analysis, not math. One of the main reasons for making this statement, is that data scientists spend an inordinate amount of time on data analysis. The traditional statement is that data scientists “spend 80% … Read more
When beginners get started with machine learning, the inevitable question is “what are the prerequisites? What do I need to know to get started?” And once they start researching, beginners frequently find well-intentioned but disheartening advice, like the following: You need to master math. You need all of the following: – Calculus – Differential equations … Read more
Over the last few blog posts, I’ve discussed some of the basics of what machine learning is and why it’s important: – Why machine learning will reshape software engineering – What is the core task of machine learning – How to get started in machine learning in R Throughout those posts, I’ve been using the … Read more
