Monthly Archives: September 2012
Weekly Data Viz #2
Each Tuesday, Eurry Kim, a student in our class, will pick one example of data visualization to share with us. Eurry writes: Here’s the visualization for this week: http://fathom.info/fortune500/ This fancy interactive time-series plot is based on a CSV file that Ben Fry found on a Wikipedia footnote — no scraping necessary! The graph breaks […]
The Data Science Process
Dear Students, Now that we’ve had our first guest lecture, I’d like to revisit the general framework I proposed for thinking about the data science process on the first day of class (when I generalized the example from Google Plus), and show how Jake’s lecture fits within this framework. Throughout the semester we’ll see that […]
Curse of dimensionality
This is a guest post by Professor Matthew Jones, from Columbia’s History department, who has been attending the course. I invited him to give his perspective on the course thus far. Few things lurk as much a challenge and instigation in data mining (or machine learning or the data sciences) as the “curse of dimensionality.” […]
Week 3: Naive Bayes, Laplace Smoothing, APIs and Scraping data off the web
Cathy O’Neil blogs about the class each week. Crossposted from mathbabe.org In the third week of the Columbia Data Science course, our guest lecturer was Jake Hofman. Jake is at Microsoft Research after recently leaving Yahoo! Research. He got a Ph.D. in physics at Columbia and taught a fantastic course on modeling last semester at […]
After-class announcements (Wednesday 9/19)
- Thanks Jake! You were awesome. - Room update: We have a new bigger room going forward! On Mondays and Wednesdays (labs and lectures) we’ll be in 313 Fayerweather starting next week. - Homework #2 is now posted. Due in two weeks. - Data scientists are the sexiest job of the 21st century, according to Harvard Business Review, […]
Course Announcements (Wednesday 9/19)
Several announcements: Please come to class having read Anderson’s Wired magazine article on the end of theory. Tonight’s guest speaker will be Jake Hofman. Here’s Jake in his own words: “i’ve recently
Weekly Data Viz #1
Each Tuesday, Eurry Kim, a student in our class, will pick one example of data visualization to share with us. This week’s is an interactive visualization of consumer spending, one measure of inflation, from the New York Times, using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Click on the link for the full effect. I’ll […]
