There’s no doubt about it that Big Data is a powerful discovery tool, but is it a force for good or are there some nefarious people out there doing questionable things with your data? Are we beginning to see the end of a time when we can call ourselves ‘private’ citizens, or is there something we can do…
As a programmer you’re spoilt for choice when it comes to programming languages. You can choose from any of a dozen really powerful languages to get the job done. When it comes to Data Science programming though, there are really only 2 choices – Python and R. Sure, there are lots of other languages that are useful and can be used to…
If you’re making the switch to Data Science, you might have come from a programming route or from science. It would be all too easy to learn a few new skills in data handling and machine learning and neglect statistics. After all, many of the new breed of Data Scientists are declaring stats to be dead. They are…
Let’s say you have collected your data and have a nice, clean dataset. You’re ready to start doing your analysis. Hold on there cowboy, not so fast. You wouldn’t start building your house without putting the foundations in place, would you? The last thing you need is for all your hard work to come crashing down because…
If you’ve been following our blog for a while you’ll know that every month we produce a blog post where we showcase and review 3 FREE Data Science eBooks that we’ve found out there on the web. We’ve been doing this for quite a long time now and we’ve built up a sizeable collection of links…
When it comes to storytelling, we have a problem. It’s not our fault though – as human beings we are hard-wired from birth to look for patterns and explain why they happen. This problem doesn’t go away when we grow up though, it becomes worse the more intelligent we think we are. We convince ourselves that now…
If you’ve been following our blog for a while you’ll know that every month we produce a blog post where we showcase and review 3 FREE Data Science eBooks that we’ve found out there on the web. We’ve been doing this for quite a long time now and we’ve built up a sizeable collection of links…
Want to be an expert statistician? Great – enjoy the next 10 years of hard work! What about machine learning? Do you want to be an expert in that? Or what about programming or data visualisation? That’ll be 10 years (or more) for each. If you want to be an expert data scientist you’re going to need…
Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning are all the rage in the press these days, and if you want to be a good Data Scientist you’re going to need more than just a passing understanding of what they are and what you can do with them. There are loads of different methodologies, but for me I would always suggest Artificial…
Programming is one of the most important aspects of being a Data Scientist – it’s sort of like the glue that binds together the statistics, artificial intelligence, the visualisation, and so on. It’s not easy, though, especially if you’re just making the transition to it. On the other hand, there are some programming languages that are easier to learn…
If you didn’t know it yet, statistics is really important in science and society. It used to be used mainly for hypothesis testing, but in these days of Data Science, Big Data and the Internet of Things it’s being used just as much for making discoveries and formulating new hypotheses. Until just a few short years ago biology was a data-poor discipline, but since The Human Genome…
There’s no doubt about it – Data Science is big news right now. We see it on the news every day, the increasing number of news stories about Big Data, the Internet of Things, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, smart cars, smart cities, smart politicians. Continue Reading
Wow – it is March already? I can’t believe it’s been a whole month since our last Free Data Science books blog post. How time flies. This month we have 3 books that I think will define what it means to be a Data Scientist over the coming decade. I think it’ll be less about data analysis,…
How are your New Year resolutions going? I hope you managed to stick to them – especially the one about improving your Data Science ninja skills! If you’ve lapsed (I bet you have, haven’t you?), it’s not too late to renew your vows with our latest set of FREE Data Science books. This month, we have a…
Data cleaning is a waste of time. If the data had been collected properly in the first place there wouldn’t be any cleaning to do, and you wouldn’t now be faced with the prospect of weeks of cleaning to get your dataset analysis-ready. Worse still, your boss won’t understand why your analysis report isn’t on his desk…
Sometimes, when analysing your data the visualisation that you choose can end up as being a bit of an afterthought. After all, you’ve got your answer, so why waste time playing around with graphs when you can just get out there and change the world! Well, I guess you know the answer already – it’s the graph…
I’m sure you’ve all heard about the party game Chinese Whispers, where a message is given to a person at one end of a line and is then whispered to the next, then the next, and so on until it reaches its eventual destination at the other end. Typically, small changes in the message occur…
Well, that’s Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday (aka Chi-Squared Monday in these parts) over with for another year. Only Christmas to go now. Are you fed up with it all yet? In which case it might be time to escape into our latest set of FREE Data Science books. This month, there are a couple of…