Monday newsletter published by Data Science Central. Previous editions can be found here. The contribution flagged with a + is our selection for the picture of the week. To subscribe, follow this link.  

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The question of how to structure or arrange data in order to gain worthwhile insights is quite different from the issue of what data to include or how it should be analyzed.  I often find myself preoccupied with structure and organization.  In part, this is because of my belief that unique logistics can lead to different types of insights.  Popular these days to the point of gaining industry dominance is holding data as large tables.  If we peer into the code for the application…

I originally started writing this notebook to serve as an introduction decision trees. It's a description of the "1-rule" algorithm which I think is worth studying for the following reasons:

• It’s arguably the simplest and most useful machine learning algorithm you can learn
• It’s a simple introduction to “decision…

The Jupyter notebook at this link contains a tutorial that explains how to use the lxml package and xpath expressions to extract data from a webpage.

The tutorial consists of two sections:

• A basic example to demonstrate the process of downloading a webpage, extracting data with lxml and xpath and analysing it with pandas
• A comprehensive…

Back in 2017, we posted a problem related to stochastic processes and controlled random walks, offering a $2,000 award for a sound solution, see here for full details. The problem, which had a FinTech flavor, was only solved recently (December 2018) by Victor Zurkowski.

About the problem:

Let's start…

So, you think you can be a data scientist. But, are you sure you have it what it takes to excel in the data science field? Be careful. It’s a very complicated field, and getting competitive…

A report from Accentureclearly highlights those companies that don’t want to capitalize on AI will not survive the future (see Figure 1).  Adopt or die.  Yippee Ki Yay, Mr. Falcon.…

Google Data Studio is a new data visualization tool allowing you to transform your clear and dry data into visually appealing and understandable reports and to be shared then with your colleagues and clients. Using the bar graphs, geographical maps, charts, line charts, etc. you can represent your data and - the most…

Speech processing is a very popular area of machine learning. There is a significant demand in transforming human speech into text and text into speech. It is especially important regarding the development of self-services in different places: shops, transport, hotels, etc. Machines replace more and more human labor…

The past few years have seen a wave of travel companies member accounts compromised which have rocked the industry.

Cathay Pacific had 9.4M accounts compromised.…

I thought I would follow on my first blog posting with a follow-up on a claim in the post that going returns followed a truncated Cauchy distribution in three ways.  The first way was to describe a proof and empirical evidence to support it in a population study.  The second was to discuss the consequences by performing simulations so that financial modelers using things such as the Fama-French, CAPM or APT would understand the full consequences of that decision.  The third was to discuss…

“The internet is killing retail. Bookstores are just the first to go.” -- quoted in this NYT article. Retail bookstores are in a death row; looks like it's just a matter of time for those to be in the museum. eBooks are partly to blame, but with eBook sales leveling off recently, the remaining affect seems to be online book sales, dominated by, with no surpirse!, Amazon. So, exactly how long retail bookstores are going to…

Geoffrey Hinton dismissed the need for explainable AI. A range of experts have explained why he is wrong.

I actually tend to agree with…

How will AI evolve and what major innovations are on the horizon? What will its impact be on the job market, economy, and society? What is the path toward human-level machine intelligence? What should we be concerned about as artificial intelligence advances?…

The new advice today for data scientists is not to become a generalist. You can read recent articles on this topic, for instance here.  In this blog, I explain why I believe it should be the opposite. I wrote about this…

Speed of Adoption will matter more than ever

It’s been a while since businesses have been debating over investment into data and analytics. Some people have already done it and it is working out. We are over and above the apprehensions of whether Data investments work or not, now,  the questions is how soon you can make it work. It has to be strategy first and a top down push on getting the data investments to execution and results. It is a herculean task but by now…

For my final class this year at the University of San Francisco School of Management, I taught the students using nothing but infographics.  Not only was it fun for me, but I think the students enjoyed being able to summarize their learnings from the semester through group discussions centered around the infographics.  The infographics provide a visual opportunity to meld the three fundamental concepts that I believe every business leader needs to understand to be…

Huge amount data have been generated every day on various platforms such as Wikipedia, technical and non-technical blogs, social media, online news articles etc. Around five millions of articles are present in Wikipedia alone and every day thousands of new articles are added to it. Due to the huge amount data gathered every day, the users are bombarded with the large volume of data. For the human being, it is difficult to assimilate this huge amount of data. So, effective techniques are…

E-commerce has become more popular with the growth in internet and network technologies. Many people feel convenient to buy products online using various forums such as Amazon, Flipchart, Awok etc. When customers buy the products online there is an option for them to provide their review comments. Many customers chose to provide their experience, opinion, feedback etc. Such product reviews are rich in information consisting of feedback shared by users. The review…