2021/10/03
On Google Maps Directions
Google Maps and its Directions feature are the kind of data science product everyone wished they’d be building. It augments the user, enabling decision-making while driving. Directions exemplifies the difference between prediction and prescription. Google Maps doesn’t just expose data, and it doesn’t provide a raw analysis by-product like SHAP values. It processes historical and live data to predict the future and to optimize my route based on it, returning only the refined recommendations.
2017/07/01
Pokémon Recommendation Engine
Using t-SNE, I wrote a Shiny app that recommends similar Pokémon. Try it out here. Needless to say, I was and still am a big fan of the Pokémon games. So I was very excited to see that a lot of the meta data used in Pokémon games is available on Github due to the Pokémon API project. Data on Pokémon’s names, types, moves, special abilities, strengths and weaknesses is all cleanly organized in a few dozen csv files.
2015/09/21
Taxi Pulse of New York City
I don’t know about you, but I think taxi data is fascinating. There is a lot you can do with the data sets as they usually contain observations on geolocation as well as time stamps besides other information, which makes them unique. Geolocation and timestamps alone, as well as the large number of observations in cities like New York enable you to create stunning visualizations that aren’t possible with any other set of data.
2015/08/26
Analyzing Taxi Data to Create a Map of New York City
Yet another day was spent working on the taxi data provided by the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC). My goal in working with the data was to create a plot that maps the streets of New York using the geolocation data that is provided for the taxis’ pickup and dropoff locations as longitude and latitude values. So far, I had only used the dataset for January of 2015 to plot the locations; also, I hadn’t used the more than 12 million observations in January alone but a smaller sample (100000 to 500000 observations).