What Problem Are You Trying to Solve, Anyway? - Alfred Lee

If you're changing careers into programming, or especially data science, don't be intimidated by the stars and the experts. You may know more than you think you know.

1. What Problem Are You Trying to Solve, Anyway? Alfred Lee, PhD! Data Scientist, Paperless Post! Instructor, General Assembly! PyGotham 2014
2. Why am I talking at you? Imposter Syndrome Synthesis Python as Playground
3. Who am I? SOURCE: (NASA photo / Jim Ross) http://www.nasa.gov/ mission_pages/SOFIA/multimedia/imagegallery/index.html
4. Who am I?
5. Who am I?
6. Who am I?
7. Who am I?
8. What’s it like? An illustrative, though atypical example
9. A problem Let’s cluster our users
10. The Standard Solutions SOURCE: scikit-learn docs: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/ auto_examples/cluster/plot_cluster_comparison.html
11. The Question How do our users use the site?
12. Tangent 1 SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_alignment
13. Tangent 2 SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disjoint- set_data_structure http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percolation_theory
14. Tangent 3 SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGnpkxrRxZI
15. Putting it together
16. User Snippets …
17. Weighted Jaccard
18. Nope … …
19. cosine distance with tf-idf weighting Term frequency - inverse document frequency cos θ θ
20. cluster 1/5
21. cluster 2/5
22. cluster 3/5
23. cluster 4/5
24. cluster 5/5
25. What’s it like? Lots of places to synthesize new ideas from past experiences
26. What it seems like the stars know Idols You
27. Actually, knowledge is fuzzy Idols You
28. Python A productive playground for prototyping possibilities
29. Closing Note Don’t wantonly break things, try not to fail. Not thinking, not creating, not doing is failing. You don’t have to be perfect to be useful.
30. Thank you Alfred Lee, PhD Data Scientist, Paperless Post Instructor, General Assembly @alphrabet https://www.paperlesspost.com/jobs