ARIMA modeling has felt like a bit of a nemesis since I was first exposed to it. Figuring out what settings to use with it has been my main challenge. The ACF and PACF plots are supposed to help here, but you have to learn to read them somewhat. There is an auto.arima option, which tests Read More
Getting Ready For Data Science
Yesterday I got my student number from the University that I am doing my Data Science apprenticeship with and I am so excited! Honestly, I thought I had missed my chance to do a degree and resigned myself to never having one. I’ve done okay for myself and I was quite sure that I didn’t need Read More
Show Me What You Got
Historically I’ve been averse to public speaking, but lately presenting thoughtfully has been on my mind. For example, at work our weekly meetings have a couple of people simply reading their notes aloud. Since they send out the notes before the meeting, this didn’t feel like it added value to the meeting and so I called Read More
Battling Stubbornness With Stubbornness
I am so stubborn that I will struggle on a problem for a long time by myself without asking for help. When it looks like I won’t be able to do it, I’d rather just take a break. And then, I’ll just keep searching forums for similar enough questions rather than asking myself. So my current Read More
Udacity Saves The Day
I am so far off track with my Nanodegree, the deadline came and went yesterday. Luckily, what also came yesterday was an email from Udacity explaining that they were giving me another 4 weeks to complete the course! This is something I had read about before on their website, but I still really wanted to complete Read More
Quick Update On Fuzzy Matching In Excel
A little while ago I wrote about the benefits of fuzzy matching and the add-on for Excel that Microsoft provides. Well since then Microsoft have been super helpful and put the fuzzy matching function from Power BI into Excel’s Power Query too! Happy fuzzing!
Fancy New Updates And Fancy New Skills
Last week there was an update rolled out to my copy of Microsoft Office. Usually this wouldn’t merit much discussion, but this update included improvements to a tool I’ve been using extensively for the past few months; Power Query. What improvement was that? It was the super useful Intellisense feature, as well as syntax highlighting. Basically, Read More
Stop Overusing Power Query!
This is mainly a post to remind myself to stop relying so heavily on using Power Query to do everything. I am almost certain that if I learned how to use Power Pivot, it would do all of the things I keep doing in Power Query much faster. Today I used Power Query to create multiple Read More
From Excel To Data Science
Today I was doing plenty of data prep stuff in Excel using Power Query, and waiting for it to load my changes over and over again. While I was waiting, I had an idea: could I transition my Excel work over to R? I found this: https://medium.com/district-data-labs/how-to-transition-from-excel-to-r-f9304fabcbab And this: So it seems very realistic for me Read More
Coming Clean On Frustration
Yesterday I wrote a post about how frustrating this game, slither.io, can be. On reflection, it wasn’t really the game at all. Sure there were other players acting in seemingly irrational ways, but that’s normal, I expect that. The reason my frustration got blown out of proportion is that I couldn’t understand some details of the Read More