Data Science Weekly - Issue 178
Issue #178 April 20 2017
Quick Question For You: Do you want a Data Science job?
"No": Scroll on down to the regular newsletter!
"Yes": Great news! After helping hundred of readers like you get Data Science jobs, we've distilled all the real-world-tested advice into a self-directed course that guides you in constructing your own highly personalized plan for what you need to learn and what you can safely ignore - saving you time, effort, and worry.
The course is broken down into three guides:
Data Science Getting Started Guide. This guide shows you how to figure out the knowledge gaps that MUST be closed in order for you to become a data scientist quickly and effectively (as well as the ones you can ignore)
Data Science Project Portfolio Guide. This guide teaches you how to start, structure, and develop your data science portfolio with the right goals and direction so that you are a hiring manager's dream candidate
Data Science Resume Guide. This guide shows how to make your resume promote your best parts, what to leave out, how to tailor it to each job you want, as well as how to make your cover letter so good it can't be ignored!
For more details about each specific guide, and to see if it can help you as much as it's helped others, click here to learn more.
Cheers,
Hannah & Sebastian.
Now on to this week's newsletter!...
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Editor Picks
Self-driving Car Course with Python, TensorFlow, OpenCV, and Grand Theft Auto 5
I've put out a so far 13-part series on creating a self driving vehicle with Grand Theft Auto 5...
Emotional Chatting Machine Assesses Your Emotion and Copies It
Chatbots have never been able to empathize. That looks set to change, thanks to a Chinese team that has built a chatbot capable of conveying specific emotions...
AI can predict heart attacks more accurately than doctors
This machine learning algorithm beats ACC/AHA guidelines by 7.6 percent...
A Message from this week's Sponsor:
[WHITEPAPER] Applied Data Science by Yhat, Inc.
This is a white paper about data science teams and how companies apply their insights to the real world. You’ll learn how successful data science teams are composed and operate and which tools and technologies they are using.
Data Science Articles & Videos
Facebook’s Perfect, Impossible Chatbot
Facebook is quietly trying to develop the most useful virtual assistant ever, in a project that illustrates the current limitations of artificial intelligence...
Visualizing the Taste of a Community of Cinephiles Using t-SNE
In this post we are going to look at an interactive visualization that clusters movies together based on user ratings. This visualization will give us a glimpse into a community of cinephiles...
Google’s AI Turns Your Crappy Doodles Into Proper Pictures
You no longer need to worry if your drawing is awful, because Google’s neural networks have your back—some of the time, at least...
A Neural Parametric Singing Synthesizer
We present a new model for singing synthesis based on a modified version of the WaveNet architecture. Instead of modeling raw waveform, we model features produced by a parametric vocoder that separates the influence of pitch and timbre. This allows conveniently modifying pitch to match any target melody, facilitates training on more modest dataset sizes, and significantly reduces training and generation times...
NBA Foul Calls and Bayesian Item Response Theory
Since 2015, the NBA has released a report reviewing every call and non-call in the final two minutes of every NBA game where the teams were separated by five points or less with two minutes remaining. The NBA is certainly marketed as a star-centric league, so this data set presents a fantastic opportunity to understand the extent to which the players involved in a decision impact whether or not a foul is called...
Predicting Churn without Machine Learning
In this post I will describe a way of predicting churn based on customers' inactivity profile that I've applied in various client engagements. Without using machine learning algorithms, the model delivers an interpretable prediction of churn that gives a fairly accurate insight into the customers leaving the base...
Gender Roles with Text Mining and N-grams
Today is the one year anniversary of the janeaustenr package’s appearance on CRAN, its cranniversary, if you will. I think it’s time for more Jane Austen here on my blog....
Stitchfix- The Making of the Tour, Part 2: Simulations
In our first installment of this Making of the Tour series we gave a general overview of our development process and our scrollytelling code structure. Now we get to dig into some details. In this post, we’ll talk about some simulation-powered animations, provide some cleaned-up code that you can use, and discuss these animations’ genesis and utility for visualizing abstract systems and algorithms or for visualizing real historical data and projected futures...
Jobs
Senior Data Analyst - VSCO - Oakland, CA VSCO is a leading creative platform with a monthly audience of over 45 million and growing.
We are looking for a Senior Data Analyst to build data at VSCO from the ground up. You will design our data model for user behavior and content impression, and will mine the data to find insights that will influence the product roadmap. Expect to get your hands dirty with Redshift, Spark, and data visualization tools under the guidance of our Director of Data Science....
Training & Resources
Caffe2 - New release from Facebook
Caffe2 aims to provide an easy and straightforward way for you to experiment with deep learning and leverage community contributions of new models and algorithms. You can bring your creations to scale using the power of GPUs in the cloud or to the masses on mobile with Caffe2's cross-platform libraries...
Modifying the Python language in 6 minutes
I’m going to show you how to add a new feature to the Python syntax...
Numenta Anomaly Benchmark for Streaming Anomaly Detection
With sensors invading our everyday lives, we are seeing an exponential increase in the availability of streaming, time-series data. Finding anomalies or unusual behavior in this data can be extremely valuable, but doing it reliably is quite difficult. There are dozens of anomaly detection algorithms in the literature but it is almost impossible to evaluate them for streaming because existing benchmarks focus on non-streaming batch data. We created the open source Numenta Anomaly Benchmark (NAB) to fill this hole...
Books
Bayes Theorem: A Visual Introduction For Beginners "This book takes what can be a daunting and complex subject and breaks it down with a series of easy to follow examples which buildup to deliver a great overall explanation of how to use Bayes Theorem for basic analysis and even off-the-cuff critical thinking"...
For a detailed list of books covering Data Science, Machine Learning, AI and associated programming languages check out our resources page.
P.S. Looking to hire a Data Scientist? Find an awesome one among our readers! Email us for details on how to post your job :) - All the best, Hannah & Sebastian