Recently, I have finished a project working on testing Machine Learning algorithm performances in different data science platforms with an explicit focus on explainability. In this post, I shall describe some of the criteria and the platforms that were used in this project. In the era of the internet where vast amounts of data are
Hi all, Recently I’ve finished work on a project intended to visualise the traffic flow within a subsidised transport service, operated by a Scottish council. This visualisation needed to display variations in traffic flow conditional on factors such as the time of day, day of the week, journey purpose, as well as other criteria. The
What is Alteryx, and why should I care? This guest blog entry was inspired by Richard’s recent post in which he observed that “it is always important to keep an eye on the tools we use as data scientists and forever be on the lookout for new and better ways of doing things.” Just as Python is
Python is great, but… Since taking up Python several years ago I’ve often thought of it as the Swiss Army Knife of programming languages. After successfully using it for webscraping, software development, number-crunching and data visualisation one achieves a certain level of comfort in knowing that, if you need to do it in code, you
Last month The Data Lab was very pleased to partner with data visualisation guru Andy Kirk on a one-day workshop at the G&V Royal Mile Hotel in Edinburgh, as part of our mission to bring leading data experts to the Scottish community. My colleague Caterina Constantinescu and I were in attendance, along with around forty
Why would you need to do this? Say, for instance, you are dealing with sensitive data that should not leave a specific system, or quite simply that you are away on a work retreat – but your laptop is far less powerful than your work desktop computer which you left behind – so you want
Happy Birthday Excel! I would posit that the world’s most used data science software is the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel. Released for Windows in November 1987, this month marks its 30th anniversary. In that time I’d imagine it has been employed by all manner of people across near all industries: from the fund manager tracking his
Motivation In 2017, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe was host to 3,398 shows selling over 2.5 million tickets, numbers that are increasing year on year. With this abundance of shows it can be difficult to find something that one wants to see. I describe here how I used data to create an application that will find
Motivation Most of modern Scotland was once Gaelic-speaking and a policy change in 2010 means Gaelic names appear alongside English names on almost all station signs across Scotland’s railway. I live in Glasgow and often travel out into the highlands and over time I hypothesised: H1: The Gaelic and English names of a station become more similar
