I'm going to present a series of posts based around the sort of health and fitness data that can now be collected by some phones and dedicated fitness trackers. Not all of these will be centrally on topic for test-driven data analysis, but I think they'll provide an interesting set …

Continue reading

My first paid programming job was working for my local education authority during the summer. The Advisory Unit for Computer-Based Education (AUCBE), run by a fantastic visionary and literal "greybeard" called Bill Tagg, produced software for schools in Hertfordshire and environs, and one of their products was a simple database …

Continue reading

Guest Post by Patrick Surry, Chief Data Scientist, Hopper

Every year, Expedia and ARC collaborate to publish some annual statistics about domestic airfare, including their treatment of the perennial question "How far in advance should you book your flight?" Here's what they presented in their report last year:

Although there …

Continue reading

Good tools for testing matter because the temptation to skimp on testing is real even for true believers: anything that reduces the friction and pain associated with actually adding tests therefore has a disproportionate effect on adoption and implementation rates.

I think there are several reasons the temptation to forego …

Continue reading

Everyone building predictive models or performing statistical fitting knows about overfitting. This arises when the function represented by the model includes components or aspects that are overly specific to the particularities of the sample data used for training the model, and that are not general features of datasets to which …

Continue reading