Data Science Weekly - Issue 260
Issue #260 (5 Year Anniversary Edition!) Nov 15 2018
Editor Picks
ML Resources
As a budding student of ML, I often find myself re-googling things I've learned/forgotten many times. This afternoon, I decided to toss some favorite resources into one doc for speedy reference. Making it for my own use, but figured why not share the link...
How to deal with the seasonality of a market?
Lyft has built many tools and bonuses to incentivize drivers and passengers to use Lyft more often or at specific times. But can we predict a few weeks in advance when we will need to launch this machinery, and if it will be enough to close the gap between drivers and passengers?...
From Graduate Student to Data Scientist:
My Two Cents on Making a Successful Transition
Getting that first data science job for someone like me, having no prior work experience and an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering, wasn’t a piece of cake. Nevertheless, just as with most things in life, things have a magical way of falling into place. Looking back, it’s evident that all those stressful moments, rejections and setbacks were just guideways directing me to the right path. This path has me currently working as a Senior Data Scientist at eHealth in San Francisco...
A Message from this week's Sponsor:
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Data Science Articles & Videos
Fun with NFL Stats, Bokeh, and Pandas
Cruising through Kaggle last week, I found a CSV of NFL play-by-play statistics. I get particularly excited about sports data so I started digging into this one right away...
Waymo CEO says driverless car service coming soon
The head of Alphabet Inc.'s Waymo unit said it plans to launch its first commercial self-driving car service in the next two months and expects businesses to be among its biggest customers...
Virtual assistant called Abbie is picking best bonds for traders to buy or sell
The bot, built by asset managers AllianceBernstein Holding, scans millions of data points within seconds to find potential trades and suggest them to the company’s portfolio managers. It can find bonds people may have missed, spot human error, and communicate with other bots...
Differentiable Monte Carlo Ray Tracing through Edge Sampling
Differentiable ray tracer ... able to compute derivatives of scalar functions over a rendered image with respect to parameters such as camera pose, scene geometry, materials, and lighting...
Enterprise Web Services with Neural Networks Using R and TensorFlow
Our team doesn’t see the value in double work. We explore in R and immediately deploy in R. Our APIs are neural network models using R and TensorFlow in docker containers that are small and maintainable enough to make our DevOps team happy!...
WaveGlow: A Flow-based Generative Network for Speech Synthesis
WaveGlow combines insights from Glow and WaveNet in order to provide fast, efficient and high-quality audio synthesis, without the need for auto-regression. WaveGlow is implemented using only a single network, trained using only a single cost function: maximizing the likelihood of the training data, which makes the training procedure simple and stable...
Introduction to Amazon SageMaker Object2Vec
In this blog post, we’re introducing the Amazon SageMaker Object2Vec algorithm, a new highly customizable multi-purpose algorithm that can learn low dimensional dense embeddings of high dimensional objects...
Create Better Data Science Projects With Business Impact:
Churn Prediction with R
In this article I'll show you how to work through a project like a real-world data scientist, using customer churn data from the telecommunications industry. I'll show you step-by-step how to build a predictive model in R, and translate your results into cost savings that has a significant business impact...
Jobs
Data Scientist, Content Science - HBO - NYC
As a Data Scientist on the Data Science Solutions team, this individual will be responsible for building advance data science and analytical solutions that help HBO better understand and grow its best in class television and film library. The data products this individual develops will have a wide impact across the business, from helping HBO audiences discover new content to finding new hit television shows. The Data Scientist will work closely with engineering teams to ensure that their products and insights are properly moved into a production environment, where they can be used by the wider analytics team to drive business strategies...
Training & Resources
PyTorch numel: Calculate The Number Of Elements In A PyTorch Tensor
Learn how to calculate the number of elements in a PyTorch Tensor by using the PyTorch numel operation, via a screencast video and full tutorial transcript...
Variational Autoencoders Explained in Detail
In this post I explain how to implement VAE - including simple to understand tensorflow code, using MNIST. I also explain a cool trick of how you can generate an image of a digit conditioned on the digit. This is something a vanilla VAE doesn't allow you...
Non-negative matrix factorization for recommendation systems
Have you ever thought how do recommendation systems work, how to prepare an interpretable segmentation or optimize your marketing campaign target group? I have good news for you! After reading this article, you will know the answer to all of these questions on a fundamental level. Let me introduce you to Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm...
Books
Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight "The best single book on Data Science today. I handle the data analysis and BI for the delivery side of a huge internet-based retail company, and have been a fan of Foreman's since his "Analytics Made Skeezy" blog days. His explanations are clear, his examples are to the point, and throughout it all, he is results-oriented."...
For a detailed list of books covering Data Science, Machine Learning, AI and associated programming languages check out our resources page.
P.S., Want to reach our audience / fellow readers? Consider sponsoring - grab a spot now; first come first served! All the best, Hannah & Sebastian