Data Analytics Workouts

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell My rating: 4 of 5 stars I enjoy reading in systems and complexity, and this was a nice addition to my shelf, with a slightly different take than other books. I found a few areas in the first half a bit tedious, overly long, repetitive, and not illuminating, but generally, it's a great overview of seminal work and very thought-provoking. The first half overlaps but nicely differs from other books I've read, covering things like chaos and information processing, and the latter half of the book I found more engaging, focused on models, computation, network science, and scaling. As mentioned, although I found the first half a bit of a slog at times, the second half was very engaging. View all my reviews

Although I've made many posts on my Data Analytics Workouts site, some generated more interest than others - nothing here was virally popular - and below are a handful of the most popular, sorted in descending order of views: Charting Correlation Matrices in R (877) Neural Networks (Part 4 of 4) - R Packages and Resources (507) Performance Improvements in R: Vectorization & Memoisation (322) Naive Bayes on Political Outcome Based on State-level Big Five Assessment (263) Decision Trees on Political Outcome Based on State-level Big Five Assessment (262) F# is Part of Microsoft's Data Science Workloads (223) Logistic Regression on Stock Data using Google and SPY (SPDR S&P 500) (196) Using Visual Studio Team Services for Personal Development (194) Microsoft Azure Notebooks - Live code - F#, R, and Python (186) Efficient R Programming - A Quick Review (178) Patents Per Capita and Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions (167) Comparing Performance in R Usin...

Overview Microsoft provides free access to its online Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) , and for some time I've been using the service, I've wanted to restructure my code hierarchy, and recent changes in my work environment, automated build and deployment using Octopus, nudged me to finally take the task on, so in the past few weeks I've: Restructured my Code library into one big project with sub-projects for Development, Websites, and Work Developed my Work hierarchy of Epics, Features, Stories and Tasks, along with queries and sprint boards Automated all of my builds via check-in, adding extensions to evaluate code and build quality Developed a dashboard to oversee the status of work Code Library I was frustrated with the limitations of working with my code library, and after reading opinions on best practices, I settled on one big project for my code, which I assumed would make it easier to manage my time and energy, and give me a global view of my individu...