Here in the UK we're about to go to the polls to elect some sort of government in just a few weeks. Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight team are naturally on the case in providing their famously accurate election forecasts. They were kind enough to explain again the methodology being used in this blog post by Ben Lauderdale. Go … Continue reading Behind the scenes of the FiveThirtyEight UK general election forecasting model
Month: March 2015
The most toxic place on Reddit
Reddit, the "front page of the internet" - and a network I hardly ever dare enter for fear of being sucked in to reading 100s of comments for hours on highly pointless yet entertaining things - has had its share of controversies over the years. The site is structurally divided up into "subreddits" , which … Continue reading The most toxic place on Reddit
Free data: data.gov.uk – thousands of datasets from the UK government
Data.gov.uk is the official portal that releases what the UK government deems of as open data. The government is opening up its data for other people to re-use. This is only about non-personal, non-sensitive data – information like the list of schools, crime rates or the performance of your council. At the time of writing it … Continue reading Free data: data.gov.uk – thousands of datasets from the UK government
Gephi basics: simple network graph analysis from spreadsheet data
Several interesting phenomena can be modelled and analysed using graph theory. Graph theory, which Wikipedia tells me first had a paper published about it in 1736 (!) can at its most basic perhaps be thought of as mathematical techniques to analyse problems where one can represent the protagonists as a set of objects (nodes) and lines connecting … Continue reading Gephi basics: simple network graph analysis from spreadsheet data
Quantified-self products of the future – an exhibition
Dublin Science Gallery have got a very data-focused exhibition on until April 17th, on the sort-of hot topic of "lifelogging", that ever-increasing hobby of tracking not only one's Fitbit steps but most anything one can vaguely quantify about one's life. It sounds like one of the funnest parts of it might be Karl Toomey's "lifelogging products of the future" area. Here … Continue reading Quantified-self products of the future – an exhibition
Free data: Yelp “challenge” dataset: 1.6mi reviews, tips, business data
"1.6M reviews and 500K tips by 366K users for 61K businesses 481K business attributes, e.g., hours, parking availability, ambience. Social network of 366K users for a total of 2.9M social edges. Aggregated check-ins over time for each of the 61K businesses" Plus if you're a student you could win $5000 for playing with it. Go … Continue reading Free data: Yelp “challenge” dataset: 1.6mi reviews, tips, business data
Calculating prior year differences with custom calendars Tableau challenge
Visualisations of KPIs always require some context in order to make the analysis conducive to decision-making rather than just looking pretty. One that is very common within businesss and elsewhere would be to check some value, for example sales revenue, against the same value within the same time period last year. "Same time period last … Continue reading Calculating prior year differences with custom calendars Tableau challenge
Why version 9 will {FIX} Tableau for me (and workarounds in the mean time)
Excitement builds within the dataviz world as the next version of Tableau gets close to launch, supposedly within the next 60 days. It has many new features, which data geeks and other fans can see an preview being dripped out piece by piece in the Tableau blog, and summaries elsewhere, but one has really caught my attention, … Continue reading Why version 9 will {FIX} Tableau for me (and workarounds in the mean time)
Dabbling with Data 