Last week, I finished the 6 course Data Analyst Nanodegree offered by Sabastian Thrun’s Udacity Inc. Even with an above average number of academic credentials behind me, I will venture to say that this was the best educational endeavor I’ve been through yet. When I worked through my undergrad and graduate degrees in economics, I … [Read more…]
A few weeks back I submitted a project to Udacity’s Intro to Data Science Course that analyzed a dataset of NYC subway entries and weather. It was an attempt to explore, visualize, and build a model to predict hourly subway entries. It was almost an end to end data project… except that they supplied the … [Read more…]
Wrapped up the second project in Udacity’s Data Analyst Nanodegree last night. In a nutshell, the goal of the project was to Download a .osm file > 50 MB of any geographic boundary from around the world (I used Denver-Boulder, CO which is 616 MB) Parse the .osm file and clean the data specific to … [Read more…]
In this post I’ll pretend that I am teaching a data science course on collecting, cleaning, storing, and updating data. Rather than pretending my students are computer scientists or software developers, I’ll pretend that they are business analysts or college grads going on to become business analysts. However, I’ll assume they know some programming (python), … [Read more…]
As I ventured into Lesson 4 in Udacity’s Data Wrangling with MongoDB, I really wanted to run the first script — inserting a record into the database — locally. I feel like I really damaged the sanctity of my files by installing, uninstalling, messing with permission, etc. for hours in all different locations in my … [Read more…]
The result of a google search for ‘itertools’ one day late last week resulted in my Chrome browser caving in to reveal a hidden message. It said ‘You’re speaking our language. Up for a challenge?’ But of course! I’ve since read a few articles about what this is — Business Insider article and Reddit thread — and … [Read more…]
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) regularly publishes data on storm occurrences in the US. They make available annual data dating back to 1950 and it includes time-series, geographic proximity, and financial destruction information as well as storm characteristics (event type, width of tornado, wind gust estimates, etc.). While you could do thousands of … [Read more…]