Data Science Weekly Newsletter

Issue

121

March 17, 2016

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Editor's Picks

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An AI with 30 Years’ Worth of Knowledge Finally Goes to Work
Having spent the past 31 years memorizing an astonishing collection of general knowledge, the artificial-intelligence engine created by Doug Lenat is finally ready to go to work....

Mathematicians Discover Prime Conspiracy
A previously unnoticed property of prime numbers seems to violate a longstanding assumption about how they behave...

Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL: A Guide to Building a High Functioning Data Science Department
If you read the recruiting propaganda of data science and algorithm development departments in the valley, you might be convinced that the relationship between data scientists and engineers is highly collaborative, organic, and creative. Just like peas and carrots. However, it’s not a well kept secret that this is seldom the case...

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Mode: Your Entire SQL Workflow in One Place
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DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis on how AI will shape the future
Beating Go was just the start — DeepMind has designs on healthcare, robots, and your phone...

Diagnosing Heart Diseases with Deep Neural Networks
The Second National Data Science Bowl, a data science competition where the goal was to automatically determine cardiac volumes from MRI scans, has just ended. We participated with a team of 4 members from the Data Science lab at Ghent University in Belgium and finished 2nd!...

Police Will Soon Be Watched by Algorithms That Try to Predict Misconduct. Is That a Good Thing?
Police in Charlotte, North Carolina, are set to become guinea pigs for a new high-tech approach to improving relations between cops and citizens. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg police department is working with University of Chicago researchers to create software that tries to predict when an officer is likely to have a bad interaction with someone. The claim is that it will be able to forewarn against everything from impolite traffic stops to fatal shootings...

The Pressing Game: Optimal Defensive Disruption in Soccer
Passing is a cardinal soccer skill and a key factor in strategy development; it helps the team to keep the ball in its possession, move it across the field, and outmaneuver the opposing team in order to score a goal. From a defensive perspective, however, it is just as important to stop passes from happening, thereby disrupting the opposing team’s flow of play. Our main contribution utilizes this fundamental observation to define and learn a spatial map of each team’s defensive weaknesses and strengths...

How to replace a pie chart
The problem with a lot of pie-chart bashing (and most “chart-shaming,” in fact) is that people don’t follow up with a better alternative. So here I’ll show how I would have created a different graph (using R and ggplot2) to communicate the same information. This also serves as an example of the thought process I go through in creating a data visualization...

Intuition in machine learning
Which perspective of an algorithm makes more sense?...

Introduction to Scikit Flow
Scikit Flow is a simplified interface for TensorFlow, to get people started on predictive analytics and data mining. It helps smooth the transition from the Scikit-learn world of one-liner machine learning into the more open world of building different shapes of ML models...

Deep-Q learning Pong with Tensorflow and PyGame
In a previous post we went built a framework for running learning agents against PyGame. Now we'll try and build something in it that can learn to play Pong. We will be aided in this quest by two trusty friends Tensorflow Google's recently released numerical computation library and this paper on reinforcement learning for Atari games by Deepmind...

Has your conversion rate changed? An introduction to Bayesian timeseries analysis with Python.
When running a large site, it's important to monitor site behavior. For an ecommerce or similar site, the key thing to measure is conversion rate - if your conversion rate goes down, something is wrong. A common - but wrong - way to measure conversion rate is to simply use a rolling window...

Visualization of Centroid Movements for K-Means Clustering
The final homework assignment for CS545 Machine Learning was to implement a K-means clustering algorithm to cluster and classify the OptDigits data...

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Director of Data & Analytics - Treehouse - Portland or Remote
Treehouse brings affordable technology education to people everywhere in order to help them achieve their dreams and change the world. As Treehouse and its store of valuable data grows, we’re looking for a Director of Data and Analytics to lead both the data team and the data vision. You’d be leading a remote, cross-functional team of data scientists and engineers and guiding Treehouse’s choices around data architecture, engineering, and analytics as we scale. It’s a chance to do great, impactful work for Treehouse and the world!...

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Installing TensorFlow on Raspberry Pi 3 (and probably 2 as well)
We did it! It took a lot of head-banging and several indirect passings-of-the-torch, but we finally got TensorFlow compiled and running properly on the Raspberry Pi! Hopefully this will enable more hardware-based machine learning projects, as well as making the distributed aspects of TensorFlow more accessible...

Using D3 To Add An SVG Element
This video covers a) D3 Append Revisited, b) Setting Selection Attributes, c) Circle Example, d) D3 Style Operator, and e) D3 Legibility through JS variables...

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Code Your Own Neural Network: A step-by-step explanation This mini-book will take you step-by-step through coding your own neural network....
"I thought this book was a great introduction to neural networks at a code level. By actually creating the thing I was able to get a decent understanding of how neural networks function..."... For a detailed list of books covering Data Science, Machine Learning, AI and associated programming languages check out our resources page...

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