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
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…
Got your Christmas shopping done yet? Nope, me neither – I usually don’t start until about 24th December… In which case, you’ve got plenty of time to devour the latest set of FREE Data Science books on offer. This month, our first offering is not actually a Data Science book, but is still very relevant to Data Scientists….
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…
Let’s face it, we’ve all been there. We’ve had a dataset that needed cleaning before we could start analysing it, so we started eyeing the data and fixing errors as we spot them. We convinced ourselves that it wouldn’t take long before we could get it done, then we can get on to the real…
My, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?It might only be October, and we’ve still got Halloween, Bonfire Night and Thanksgiving to get through, but since I brought you the last lot of data science books a month ago, the shops have filled up with Christmas stuff and all the stores smells like, well, like…
I hope you’ve enjoyed the summer (or winter, if you’re in the southern hemisphere) and are looking forward to getting the kids back to school.Here, we’ve had a couple of really nice months of warm, sunny weather, which makes a huge change – I’ve lived in Scotland for 19 years and this is the first…