I’m sure many readers got excited by the data science possibilities of the title. However, decision trees are more than statistical algorithms — in a broader sense they are any schematics used to help chart actions and consequences, whether probabilities are given or not. In this post, we’ll use ...

In 2011, Marc Andreesen claimed that software is eating the world. With hindsight, we can be more specific: Python is eating the world. The open source language is more popular than ever and sees no end in sight. While it may sound intimidating and like too much work to some analysts, ...

If you’re just getting started with building reports and other analyses in Excel using Python, it be can be confusing to see how all the steps and packages fit together. This post and accompanying visual is meant to map the basic process. If you’re not familiar with the ...

You can learn a lot about a book by reviewing its bibliography: often, an author’s biases and beliefs will be on full display there. I suppose that’s the same for me: if you list all the books I cited in Advancing into Analytics: From Excel to Python and ...

I remember when I first got into Python and heard about Anaconda. It wasn’t really clear to me if Anaconda was a “dialect” of Python code, a really awesome suite of tools for working with Python, or something else. Turns out that Anaconda is first and foremost a distribution ...

I remember my first days of coding R: I would search around for how to do X task, and find out that Y package would be really helpful. But that led to more questions: What are packages in the first place, and how do you use them? In this post, ...

Have you ever needed to pull the first record of a dataset? What about the last, or maybe even the seventeenth? This is called indexing. There’s a lot of data out there, and indexing gives us a set of rules to extract by position. Except… not every program indexes ...

In an earlier post I offered a tour of RStudio, the popular integrated development environment and my preferred interface for teaching R. With Python, I favor Jupyter notebooks so figured a similar tour would be worth it. This post lays out the basics of Jupyter, how to navigate the interface, ...