Background

As part of my PhD work, I recently had to analyze any dataset(s) of my interest and present findings.  I ended up conducting a study on US County-wise Covid-19 data.  I wanted to share my key findings through this blog.

Study Question

The primary question I wanted to address through data analysis was “Do counties’ socioeconomic factors such as population size, poverty rate, unemployment rate, education percent and…

In part 1 of this article series, I provided a quick primer on graph data structure, acknowledged that there are several graph based algorithms with the notable ones being the shortest path/distance algorithms and finally illustrated Dijkstra’s and Bellman-Ford algorithms.  Continuing with the shortest path/distance algorithms, I have illustrated Floyd-Warshall and A* (A-Star) algorithms in this part 2 of the article.  As was stated in part 1, while the inner workings of these algorithms are…

While many of the programming libraries encapsulate the inner working details of graph and other algorithms, as a data scientist it helps a lot having a reasonably good familiarity of such details.  A solid understanding of the intuition behind such algorithms not only helps in appreciating the logic behind them but also helps in making conscious decisions about their applicability in real life cases.  There are several graph based algorithms and most notable are the shortest path…