A couple weeks ago, I wrote about my initial efforts toward using machine learning to model the “master equations” that govern the Madden NFL player ratings system. This week, I’d like to put those models to use to compute the…
Category: analysis
Spurious Extrapolations: Novel and unique research abstracts
Last Christmas, BMJ published a funny article exploring the mentions of positive and negative words in research abstracts over the past 40 years. I’ve recreated their research for two of the phrases below — “novel” and “unique.” Your eyes aren’t…
Posted in analysis, data visualization Tagged with: publishing, research, spurious extrapolation, text analysis
Spurious Extrapolations: What if U.S. college tuition costs keep rising?
For this post, I’m going to test run a new post series called Spurious Extrapolations, where I extrapolate time series far beyond reason and envision what would happen if the trend continued. Let me know what you think of the…
Posted in analysis, data visualization Tagged with: college tuition, spurious extrapolation, statistics
U.S. college majors: Median yearly earnings vs. gender ratio
Last year, I looked at the gender ratios across college majors and discovered an interesting-yet-spurious correlation: College majors with higher male:female ratios (i.e., with more men than women) tend to have students with higher estimated IQs. After much debate, the…
Analyzing the health of Philadelphia’s bike share system
Last month, I wrote about my initial attempts to model and predict the usage patterns of Indego, Philadelphia’s new bike share system. To recap: If you’ve ever used a bike share before, you know that one of the biggest fears…
Posted in analysis, data visualization Tagged with: bike share, Indego, machine learning, modeling, Philadelphia
Can the Name Age Calculator guess how old you are?
Can you guess someone’s age when all you know is their first name? That was the crazy idea behind one of FiveThirtyEight’s articles last year, and their surprising answer is, “Yes.” The idea behind guessing someone’s age based on their…
Posted in analysis, data visualization Tagged with: age calculator, baby names, FiveThirtyEight, Social Security Administration
Visualizing Indego bike share usage patterns in Philadelphia
One of the many things that I love about my new home town of Philadelphia is that the government openly shares curated data sets covering most of the governmental functions. Since I recently joined Philadelphia’s Indego bike share program, I…
Posted in analysis, data visualization Tagged with: bike share, Indego, machine learning, modeling, Philadelphia
Artificial Intelligence has crushed all human records in 2048. Here’s how the AI pulled it off.
By now, we’ve all heard of the addictive tile-mashing game called 2048. Last week, I picked up 2048 for the first time and — true to my nature — I started designing an AI to beat the game for me…
Posted in analysis, data visualization Tagged with: 2048, artificial intelligence, strategy, video games
Optimized walking tours of New York City and Philadelphia
In the past couple weeks, I’ve shown you how to use machine learning to improve the efficiency of road trips all over the world, including the U.S., Europe, and South America. In this post, I’d like to show you how…
Posted in analysis, data visualization, machine learning Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, traveling salesman problem, walking tour
Pure Michigan road trip, optimized
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been computing optimal road trips across the U.S. and Europe. This time, as a shout-out to my current home state, I made a road trip around Michigan. With the snow melting and a warm…
Posted in analysis, data visualization, machine learning Tagged with: genetic algorithm, machine learning, optimization, road trip, traveling salesman problem
