Magic-wielding escapees were desperately deflecting the Imperial attacks on the fortress’ supports as best they could. Ranks of longbowmen rained down arrows, but conjured gusts of wind sent many of them flying back the other way. The rebels were holding the Imperials off for the moment, but Baldric could see it was only a matter […]
Category: Data Analytics
Intro to Python, Chapter 5 – Loops
Baldric groggily opened his eyes and was greeted by a splitting pain in his head. He had been having the strangest dream, something about a crystal, and a snake eating its own tail, and…a singing head of cabbage? Strange indeed. He looked around in the dim torchlight and found himself in a large cell of […]
Intro to Python, Chapter 4 – Functions
Running through the door, Baldric found himself in an enormous cavern, its ceiling lost in shadow. Great columns of black stone soared from the ground, and pools of lava bubbled throughout, lighting the cavern in a dark red. The heat was suffocating. Baldric saw Bill standing on a stone outcrop nearby, apparently scanning for something. […]
Intro to Python, Chapter 3 – Conditional Statements
Emerging from the sewer, Baldric found himself in the basin of a dry fountain. In its center was a marble statue of a massive fist which appeared to be composed of many entangled bodies. Employees, by how they were dressed. There were holes in various mouths and eyes that were apparently meant to be channeling […]
Intro to Python, Chapter 2 – Strings and Lists
Something was really bothering Baldric about 106479825301.0, the answer to the mysterious request he’d received. Sitting down at his desk after enduring his meeting with Kevin, he realized what it was. If you only looked at the answer’s whole number portion… >>> int(106479825301.0) 106479825301 …then every number from 0 to 10 appeared exactly once in […]
Intro to Python, Chapter 1 – Arithmetic and Variables
Seated in his cubicle, Baldric tried to block out the buzz of busy clerks scattered about the office. The usual mix of apathy, grumpiness, and existential dread filled his thoughts, but something was tugging at the back of his mind. It felt vaguely like a sense of…hope. Almost as if there was finally a way […]
Intro to Python, Prologue – The Door
His feet carried him through corridor after dark corridor, soft steps echoing in the stillness. He could feel something in these halls calling to him, drawing him near. He turned a corner and there it was, what he somehow knew he would find. A door, seemingly hewn from the surrounding stone. While it bore no […]
Kaggle Fundamentals: The Titanic Competition
Kaggle is a site where people create algorithms and compete against machine learning practitioners around the world. Your algorithm wins the competition if it’s the most accurate on a particular data set. Kaggle is a fun way to practice your machine learning skills. This tutorial is based on part of our free, four-part course: Kaggle […]
Intro to Python, Preface – The Journey Ahead
Data Rebellion presents Demons and Dwarves, An Intro to Python Adventure Call to Adventure A shadow falls over the land. Hero after hero arises to confront the encroaching evil, yet hero after hero is mercilessly slain (or accepts an offer for a pretty sweet management gig). Now, only two things stand between the all-powerful Emperor […]
Coding in Interactive Mode vs Script Mode
When programming in Python, you have two basic options for running code: interactive mode and script mode. Distinguishing between these modes can be slightly confusing for beginners, especially when you’re trying to follow along with others’ tutorials, so here’s a brief rundown. Interactive Mode Interactive mode is great for quickly and conveniently running single lines […]
How to Consolidate Multiple Django Projects
Dos and Don’ts For Success If you’ve been developing web applications for your company or a client for a few years, it’s possible you now find yourself with several individual Django projects that you’d like to consolidate. Each project might have one or a few apps with its own set of URL patterns, models, views, and […]
Text Analytics and Visualization
For this post, I want to describe a text analytics and visualization technique using a basic keyword extraction mechanism using nothing but a word counter to find the top 3 keywords from a corpus of articles that I’ve created from my blog at http://ericbrown.com. To create this corpus, I downloaded all of my blog posts […]
SQL Fundamentals
The pandas workflow is a common favorite among data analysts and data scientists. The workflow looks something like this: The pandas workflow works well when: the data fits in memory (a few gigabytes but not terabytes) the data is relatively static (doesn’t need to be loaded into memory every minute because the data has changed) […]
Text Analytics with Python – A book review
This is a book review of Text Analytics with Python: A Practical Real-World Approach to Gaining Actionable Insights from your Data by Dipanjan Sarkar One of my go-to books for natural language processing with Python has been Natural Language Processing with Python: Analyzing Text with the Natural Language Toolkit by Steven Bird, Ewan Klein, and Edward Loper. This […]
Explore Happiness Data Using Python Pivot Tables
One of the biggest challenges when facing a new data set is knowing where to start and what to focus on. Being able to quickly summarize hundreds of rows and columns can save you a lot of time and frustration. A simple tool you can use to achieve this is a pivot table, which helps […]