Quick Check In

November 29, 2016
Jocelyn Ong

Where I am now in my data science journey

It’s been a while since I posted, and I wanted to assure you that this blog is not dead. Things have been a little hectic, but I hope to come back soon with some data science technical or project related posts. Meanwhile, here’s a little update on what I’m currently busy with!

Data Science Immersive

We’re into week 11 of the Immersive and things are building up at an almost impossible speed. Looking into more advanced topics as well as case studies now - good exposure and great practice. Regularly using the tools we’ve learned is probably one of the most important things we need to do to ensure that we know how everything works. That and knowing how to look up documentation of new tools.

We don’t have any more weekly projects, but everyone’s focusing on their capstone now. I’m looking into computer vision for my capstone and hopefully will be able to write a post on it once I’m done. It’s been a steep learning curve - we covered computer vision a little in class, but I also faced other problems with my dataset - but I’ve got something working and I’m slowly ironing out the details now.

So I’ve been spending a lot of out-of-class time reading up extra articles/ documentation on the advanced topics we covered in class (I mean, there’s only so much we can cover in a day, but I’m definitely glad we were introduced to those topics) and fine-tuning my capstone project, including reading up on some stuff we weren’t able to cover in class. (I’m actually waiting for a python script to complete while I’m writing this - it’s back to the capstone once that’s done!)

Side projects (upcoming)

So besides dealing with all the coursework, I’ve also been trying to come up with side projects that I can embark on (once we’re done with the course).

Revision repository

During one of my 1-on-1 sessions or project consultations with Alex, I had the chance to ask about his authoring experience (get his book!). I don’t know if I’m ready to write a book yet, but I’ve been thinking about it, and it inspired me to do something else - one of my side projects will be a GitHub repository that will serve as both my revision notes and hopefully as a beginner data science guide to others.

Kaggle competitions

I’ve been playing with some unranked Kaggle competitions for practice and hopefully I have time to clean up those notebooks and write about them.

Relooking into previous projects

If you’ve seen some of my previous posts, I had “next steps” that I wanted to explore after we had more tools and practice, and I might go back to some of them to see if we can bring our analysis further.

Short posts

I’m hoping to do more short posts on tools that we’ve learned, maybe a small tutorial on how to use some of them, or maybe comparing between tools. Or maybe some posts on some data science theory!

Until next time

Well, thanks for reading this (it looks more like a post to help me keep track of my to-do list) and I hope you’re excited about my side projects! And for now, it’s back to more research and reading for me.