Blog Archive

All previous blog posts by Kimberly Fessel. Click on a headline to read the snippet.

Math Applications › Accuracy, Precision, and Recall — Never Forget Again!

Designing an effective classification model requires an upfront selection of an appropriate classification metric. This posts walks you through an example of three possible metrics (accuracy, precision, and recall) while teaching you how to easily remember the definition of each one. Read More ›

Python Basics › Python for Data Science: An Interview with Course Report

Python is one of the most popular computer programming languages in the world. Find out how Python is used for data science in interview with Course Report. Read More ›

Datetime › Delorean for Datetime Manipulation

Working with dates and times in Python can lead to frustration, heartache, and, ironically, lost time – but it doesn’t have to! This brief demo introduces Delorean, a library constructed to make datetime manipulation in Python easier. Read More ›

Math Applications › Measuring Statistical Dispersion with the Gini Coefficient

The Gini coefficient is a good general-purpose measure of statistical dispersion. Long since popular in the field of economics, this metric can be leveraged much more broadly to explore data from nearly any discipline. The following post includes a thorough mathematical explanation of the Gini coefficient as well as a few non-standard use cases. Read More ›

Web Scraping › Web Scraping in Python: Real Python Podcast

Do you want to get started with web scraping using Python? Find out more in this Real Python podcast. Read More ›

Web Scraping › Let's Scrape the Web: PyCon 2020 Video Tutorial

Developing web scraping skills allows you to save time and to broaden your access to data. This tutorial covers web scraping with Python from the basics of HTML to the full scraping pipeline. Read More ›

NLP › Level Up: spaCy NLP for the Win

spaCy provides an easy-to-use framework for getting started with NLP. This post covers the basics of spaCy and highlights its functionality on a small corpus of restaurant reviews.. Read More ›

Math Skills › Math for Data Science: An Interview with Course Report

Math skills are critical for a successful career in data science. Find out why in this interview with Course Report. Read More ›

Math Puzzles › Down and Up: A Puzzle Illustrated with D3.js

Math puzzles provide great amusement for some people, but many others approach them with dread--especially during interviews. Such trepidation may be unwarranted, however, because a simple visual--like the ones illustrated in this post--could be all you need to find a solution. Read More ›

Data › How to Gather Data from YouTube

You can mine YouTube's massive content library for many different types of data. This post provides instructions for obtaining the videos themselves, the video transcripts, as well as YouTube search results. Read More ›

Reviews › 5 Significant Object Detection Challenges and Solutions

Object detection problems pose several unique obstacles beyond what is required for image classification. Five such challenges are reviewed in this post along with researchers' efforts to overcome these complications. Read More ›

Reviews › A Beginner's Guide to Object Detection

This post covers the basics of object detection: what it is, various approaches to it, the measurements used to judge its results, along with a few important considerations of modern object detection. Read More ›

Data Visualization › Simple Ways to Improve Your Matplotlib

Matplotlib's default properties often yield unappealing plots that can be off-putting to many users. This post offers several simple ways to improve upon these defaults and help spruce up basic Matplotlib visualizations. Read More ›

Math Puzzles › Solving the Birthday Problem on Mars

The birthday problem is a classic probability question with a surprising result. In this post, we will solve this puzzler and extend the result by considering the answer for every planet in our solar system. Read More ›