There are no shortage of books, traditional & online courses, experts, or blogs (including this one!) about data analytics these days. For someone who may just be starting out in the field, the sheer volume of options can be overwhelming. In my experience, the best resources for self-paced learning about this expansive subject are the … Continue reading The Best Resource for Self-Paced Statistical Learning
Author: aschultzbwf
Silicon Valley’s Impact on Philanthropy
Fascinating article from the Atlantic about the impact of Silicon Valley and its growing community of data-obsessed entrepreneurs has had on the world of philanthropic giving! Very interesting to observe not only the move towards speaking in the vocabulary used by cutting edge business-types and technologists, but also the importance of metrics and quantifying impact … Continue reading Silicon Valley’s Impact on Philanthropy
2 Fantastic Examples of Visualizing Sports Data
We are currently experiencing a glut of worldwide sports entertainment with the World Cup wrapping up this weekend, the 105th edition of Le Tour de France cycling race throughout the month of July, and the Wimbledon tennis championships all taking place simultaneously. To help keep pace with every minute-by-minute development, we've found 2 excellent data … Continue reading 2 Fantastic Examples of Visualizing Sports Data
The Link Between World War II and Your Predictive Models
The Receiver Operating Characteristic, or ROC, curve is a tried-and-true diagnostic for binary classification models. Its simple, elegant design allows analysts to easily choose among multiple classifiers as well as among any number of probability cutoffs by plotting the True Positive rate against the False Positive rate. In this post, we’ll dive into the key … Continue reading The Link Between World War II and Your Predictive Models
Analytics in Context
I recently found this article on the news aggregator site Data Science Central and found the parallels between the role of analytics in fundraising and the telecom industry as described by the post's author to be very revealing. It's a good read and offers some good perspective on our work and the importance of data-driven … Continue reading Analytics in Context
Improving your office Secret Santa with R (yes, really!)
If you're joining your coworkers in the time-honored workplace tradition of Secret Santa this holiday season, look no further than this R function to improve efficiency and have a bit of fun too! For those who may not be familiar with this particular holiday tradition, a group of people get together and everyone purchases a … Continue reading Improving your office Secret Santa with R (yes, really!)
5 Takeaways from Max Kuhn’s “R for Machine Learning” Workshop
I recently had the opportunity to attend “R for Machine Learning,” one of the pre-conference workshops held in conjunction with the Predictive Analytics World conference in New York City. The instructor for this excellent hands-on workshop was none other than Max Kuhn, Data Scientist at RStudio and author of the “caret” R package (among others) … Continue reading 5 Takeaways from Max Kuhn’s “R for Machine Learning” Workshop
2017-2018 NHL Predictions!
Around the BWF Insight offices, the start of the NHL regular season is a BIG deal. Huge. So we were very excited to see this post from the good folks at SportsNet. The analysis hinges on combining three separate models into an ensemble of regular season performance for each team across the league (yes, even … Continue reading 2017-2018 NHL Predictions!
Breaking Enigma
In honor of the 73rd anniversary of D-Day, be sure to read this incredible article about the lasting impact of the battle to break the Nazi Enigma code! If you're looking for insight into the value of data-driven decision making, look no further!
Don’t Pledge Allegiance to the AI Overlords Just Yet
For all the media hub-bub about AI taking over the world in the coming years, here's a refreshing article on the lighter side of unsupervised learning fails about a neural net algorithm that came up with some rather interesting names for new colors it had invented. I think it's safe to say that we don't … Continue reading Don’t Pledge Allegiance to the AI Overlords Just Yet