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Category: Data Science

Against Citizen Data Scientists

Published 2020-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Bill Schmarzo doesn’t like the idea of “citizen data scientists” very much:

“Hello,” he says. “My name is Dr. Payne and I am your Citizen Dentist for today.”

Citizen Dentist?! You repeat the question out loud for him to hear, want an answer to this looney statement. “What is a Citizen Dentist?”

Get this. He replies, “I’m a person who performs dental work, but my proficiency and expertise is outside of the field of dentistry.”

Bill’s alternative is “Citizens of Data Science.” Click through to see what that means and how it differs.

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Using Koalas on Azure Databricks

Published 2020-01-21 by Kevin Feasel

Ginger Grant shows how you can install the koalas library on an Azure Databricks cluster:

Unfortunately if you are using an ML workspace, this will not work and you will get the error message org.apache.spark.SparkException: Library utilities are not available on Databricks Runtime for Machine Learning. The Koalas github documentation  says “In the future, we will package Koalas out-of-the-box in both the regular Databricks Runtime and Databricks Runtime for Machine Learning”.  What this means is if you want to use it now

Most of the time I want to install on the whole cluster as I segment libraries by cluster.  This way if I want those libraries I just connect to the cluster that has them. Now the easiest way to install a library is to open up a running Databricks cluster (start it if it is not running) then go to the Libraries tab at the top of the screen.

Click through for a demo of what you need to do.

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Choosing Categorical Features with Python

Published 2020-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Mesfin Gebeyaw shows how to use Multiple Correspondence Analysis to filter categorical variables for an analysis:

A general guide to interpreting the multiple correspondence analysis plot shown above for business insights would be to make a note as to how close input categorical features are to the target variable customer churn and to each other. For instance, senior citizens, customers with fiber optic internet service, those with month to month contractual agreements, and single customers or customers with no dependents are being related to a short tenure with the company and a propensity of high risk to churn. On the other hand, customers with more than a year contract, those with DSL internet service, younger customers, customers with multiple lines are being related to a long tenure with the company and a higher tendency to stay with company.

Read the whole thing.

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Using AI Builder in Power Automate

Published 2020-01-20 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati takes us through a text classification problem:

Text classification is one of the important tasks for the aim of classifying the texts based on the allocated tags.
In the previous blog, the process of how to create Text classification in the Power Apps using AI builder has been explained,

In this Blog Post, you will see how to use the created Text classification model in the Power Automate (Microsoft Flow).

Read on for the demo.

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Databricks Automated Deployment and Testing

Published 2020-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Li Yu, et al, explain how to use Databricks notebooks and MLflow to automate deployment and testing of Spark solutions:

Today many data science (DS) organizations are accelerating the agile analytics development process using Databricks notebooks.  Fully leveraging the distributed computing power of Apache Spark™, these organizations are able to interact easily with data at multi-terabytes scale, from exploration to fast prototype and all the way to productionize sophisticated machine learning (ML) models.  As fast iteration is achieved at high velocity, what has become increasingly evident is that it is non-trivial to manage the DS life cycle for efficiency, reproducibility, and high-quality. The challenge multiplies in large enterprises where data volume grows exponentially, the expectation of ROI is high on getting business value from data, and cross-functional collaborations are common.

In this blog, we introduce a joint work with Iterable that hardens the DS process with best practices from software development.  This approach automates building, testing, and deployment of DS workflow from inside Databricks notebooks and integrates fully with MLflow and Databricks CLI. It enables proper version control and comprehensive logging of important metrics, including functional and integration tests, model performance metrics, and data lineage. All of these are achieved without the need to maintain a separate build server.

Read on to see how.

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Cluster-Based Image Analysis and Reduction

Published 2020-01-16 by Kevin Feasel

Sebastian Sauer takes an image and reduces it to a group of colors:

This post is a remake of this casestudy: https://fallstudien.netlify.com/fallstudie_bildanalyse/bildanalyse

brought to you by Karsten Lübke.

The main purpose is to replace the base R command that Karsten used with a more tidyverse-friendly style. I think that’s easier (for me).

We will compute a cluster analysis to find the typical RGB color per cluster.

Click through for quite a bit of R code and a couple interesting turns.

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Differences Between Kaggle and Real Life

Published 2020-01-13 by Kevin Feasel

Sergii Makarevych explains the differences between a Kaggle competition and a business-world data science project:

There are some very important differences between a Kaggle competition and real-life project which beginner Data Scientists should know about. Kaggle creates a fantastic competition spirit. Its leaderboard drives people to deliver better and better solutions pushing accuracy to the limit. Kaggle’s Notebooks and Discussions make it easy to share knowledge and learn. However real-life projects are somewhat different. I hope this article will be helpful for people who consider moving into Data Science starting with Kaggle competitions. I remember I was a little bit overwhelmed when on my first real-life project all the models, that typically worked well on Kaggle, miserably failed. I wish I was prepared for this.

It’s a sensible list of differences. Kaggle emphasizes one part of the data science process, but businesses end up needing the whole thing.

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Evaluating Classification Models

Published 2020-01-03 by Kevin Feasel

Dan Fitton takes us through some of the useful techniques and measures for evaluating classification models:

The confusion matrix is perhaps the most important thing to look at when evaluating a classification model. It contains a large amount of insight for such a small sized table. Despite its name, the confusion matrix is actually quite simple. It is a matrix that visualises the count of actual class instances against predicted class instances. This allows you to quickly see the amount of correct and incorrect predictions for each category, and whether any bias exists, and if so, where it is.

The example is specifically around Azure ML, but applies across the board. I think people get a little bit too hung up on accuracy and forget about important measures like positive and negative predictive value.

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NFL Kicker Quality

Published 2019-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

Jacob Long has an outstanding pair of posts on evaluating kickers in the NFL. FIrst up is the analysis itself:

Justin Tucker is so great that, quite frankly, it doesn’t matter which metric you use. PAA, FG% – eFG%, or just plain old FG%, he’s unlike anyone else in the past 10 years. Given the well-documented trend of increasing kicker accuracy in the NFL, I think Tucker has a solid claim on being the greatest kicker of all time.

Even with fewer seasons than many of his competitors, his PAA are double all the others who kicked in the past 10 years. He had a slightly more difficult than average set of attempts but made a higher percentage of his attempts than anyone who has had more than 22 tries. Good luck trying to find any defect in Tucker’s record.

Jacob then covers the method in detail:

Pasteur and Cunningham-Rhoads — I’ll refer to them as PC-R for short — gathered more data than most predecessors, particularly in terms of auxiliary environmental info. They have wind, temperature, and presence/absence of precipitation. They show fairly convincingly that while modeling kick distance is the most important thing, these other factors are important as well. PC-R also find the cardinal direction of every NFL stadium (i.e., does it run north-south, east-west, etc.) and use this information along with wind direction data to assess the presence of cross-winds, which are perhaps the trickiest for kickers to deal with. They can’t know about headwinds/tailwinds because as far as they (and I) can tell, nobody bothers to record which end zone teams defend at the game’s coin toss, so we don’t know without looking at video which direction the kick is going. They ultimately combine the total wind and the cross wind, suggesting they have some meaningful measurement error that makes them not accurately capture all the cross-winds. Using their logistic regressions that factor for these several factors, they calculate an eFG% and use it and its derivatives to rank the kickers.

Those wind factors make certain stadiums like New Era Field (where Buffalo plays) tricky: it’s fun to see two flags right next to each other pointing in opposite directions, or the flags on the field goal posts pointing hard right, then switching to hard left, then switching back to hard right over the course of a field goal try. H/T R-Bloggers

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Time Series Anomaly Detection with Power BI

Published 2019-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

Leila Etaati takes us through time series anomaly detection with Cognitive Services and Power Query:

I am excited about this blog post, this is based on the New service in Cognitive Service name “Anomaly Detection” which is now in Preview.
I recorded a video about how it works in cognitive service https://youtu.be/7ZOtZDbn6gM. 

However, I am going to talk about how to use it in Power BI. In this post first, a brief introduction to the anomaly detection will be presented, then how it can be used inside Power BI will be discussed.

It sounds like there are still some rough edges, but they already have the makings of an interesting service.

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