Loans are terrifying and confusing and downright frustrating. To this day, even after navigating the treacherous waters of taking out a mortgage, I still find myself a little confused about how it all fits together. One of the tools I came across that really helped clarify how my payments actually affected my loan balance, and […]
As soon as I discovered Plotly I rushed to stick it into just about every project I had at hand, and was almost immediately…annoyed. My introduction to visualization in python came primarily from matplotlib and it’s stylish counterpart seaborn; trying to work with Plotly to create charts of the same stylistic caliber ended up turning into a bit of a time sink. Enter Plotly Express – the far more intuitive, easily styled implementation of Plotly I wanted.
This is a bare bones tutorial on how to generate a Geopandas DataFrame from a SHP file in python. There are some good examples out there, but not really one that gave it the minimal approach I was looking for. I definitely learned a lot from the examples in Andrew Gaidus’ site; for a more […]
In my early journey into the murky depths of data science and machine learning I’ve come across the phrase Random Forest a few times, and been completely clueless as to what it actually referred to. Today I decided to dive in and explore the concept. So, what is a Random Forest? Here’s what the wise […]
I’m in the midst of unsteadily lurching through my first real Kaggle Competition, leaving behind the false comfort of the MNIST Digit recognition and other “Hello World” style machine learning problems. During this process it was very quickly made clear to me just how much of a beginner I am, and that, even with my background in philosophy, I’ve just barely scratched the surface when it comes to Natural Language Processing (NLP) in a Machine Learning context. This was made abundantly clear to me when, after looking at some of the leading kernels for inspiration, found they all practiced some form of NLP text preprocessing and analysis prior to feeding their data into the almighty Algorithm (typically BERT, in this scenario).
I’ve always had a fondness for maps; you can find them in various boxes, in books as book-markers, stuffed away within old piles of bills and such heavily stained with mug rings and disuse. Not sure why I continue to keep them. I think what it really comes down to is that its such a […]