Graph visualizations don’t receive serious treatment as compared to other graphical representations of data like line charts, bar charts, and box plots. Edward Tufte’s classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information contains 0, yes 0, graph visualizations. That is a shame because graphs can be just as useful when applied correctly. What is a… Read More Graph Visualizations: Why and When are they Useful
I skipped a few weeks of reflections but I’ll make up for it here in the monthly roundup. June Final Stats June went pretty well for me. My highlight was being viewed and linked to by an investor in Algorithmia. Reassuring to know that all these posts I’m writing are coherent and useful. See the… Read More Monthly Reflection June
Last week, I wrote about using the Google Maps API to visualize travel times according to when you want to leave by using their “Depart at” feature to simulate traffic. This week I took it a step further and made an interactive version. Go give it a try next time you have to drive somewhere, especially… Read More Visualization Vednesday: Travel Times Interactive Version
Algorithmia was recently in the news for receiving Series A funding from Google. The concept is pretty cool. Create a marketplace for machine learning algorithms that allows companies without a large R&D team to use algorithms as a black box. Algorithmia: How it works I created an account and was given “credits” to call algorithms.… Read More Algorithmia for Lolcat OCR Review
I’m starting a new posting series called “Visualization Vednesday” where I’ll talk about or create a visualization and critique it. For this first post, let’s talk about Google Maps and travel times. Travel Times Problem Yesterday I had to drive home from my parents house to go to dinner with my grandma who had just… Read More Visualization Vednesday: Travel Times
Before diving into how exactly Nate Silver’s Elo algorithm works I want to tell you a little about Nate Silver. Nate Silver first became famous from his MLB player projection tool PECOTA and managing Baseball Prospectus, a website devoted to baseball “sabermetrics”. Nate became publicly famous for predicting 49/50 states in the 2008 presidential election and was named… Read More Replicating Nate Silver’s NBA Elo Algorithm
As things go, last week I had some goals. I hit some of them, missed a lot, and have some changes this week. I did really well about acquiring new datasets for the sports data site — I added 6 years of NBA, nate silver’s elo algorithm, and increased my ATS record for NBA games… Read More Weekly Reflection 6/13/2017
Everyone thinks the NBA is rigged and it’s definitely been true in the past with the 2007 NBA Betting Scandal. But with last nights final’s game many questionable fouls were called in the first half and the issue on everyone’s minds. Last night I was talking with some friends and decided to actually look at… Read More Is the NBA Rigged? Analysis of Fouls in Clinching Games
Whenever I look for a new data source on the NFL or daily fantasy betting, I find a bunch of sad souls that don’t realize how easy it is to scrape data. People always want excel workbooks that already have all the data they need modeled up and ready to go but unfortunately they have… Read More How to Scrape Historical DraftKings Data in Under 20 Minutes
I feel a bit silly writing like this. I’ve never really written a reflection before but I’m working on becoming a better writer so here goes nothing. Reflecting on Last Week Last week I decided to focus on techy things again. I hit 1K views in a day on quora the week before and I… Read More Weekly Reflection 6/4/2017
