And what you can learn in the process of building your own web crawler and scraper
Frustrated with constantly watching and refreshing the CVS vaccine page to see if a vaccine appointment is available, many people who are eligible for appointments (like my mom and my partner) are just giving up. No one has the energy or time to play the Can-I-get-BonJovi-TicketMaster-Tickets-Like-Its-1999 game. 2.5 hours of manually hitting the refresh button isn’t good for users, and it’s not good for businesses.
So, let’s democratize some automation, and learn some new python skills in the process.
This tutorial shows you how I built my CVS Covid Vaccine Appointment Availability Checker, while also discussing some of the basic…
Hands-on Tutorials
A guide to answering the question, “What drives the winningness of candy?”
In a Data Science interview a few years ago, I was challenged to use a small data set from our friends at FiveThirtyEight to suggest how best to design a good-selling candy. “Based on ‘market research’ you see here,” the prompt gestured, “advise the product design team on the best features of a candy that we can sell alongside brand-name candies.”
An Easy-to-follow guide to driving business value with unsupervised ML in Python
Targeted marketing requires that we identify cohorts — or segments — of customers, and define what the characteristics are that bring them together. When developing a new brand, for example, you want to know if the new offering is likely to acquire customers from other parts of your portfolio who may or may not be highly-engaged with your current offerings. When defining and flagging audiences, you might want to define different cohorts of viewing behaviors. There are just as many applications of segmentation as there are ways to implement it in python using ML.
Understanding Business Reviews at Scale
Businesses want to understand the types of experiences their customers are having, and what elements of a shopping experiences are successes or areas for opportunity. In the old days, we might send surveyors out to poll what people are saying, and then read through a few hundred to pull out key elements of their experience.
That has all changed in the age of online reviews, where millions reviews are globally posted per day. We can’t read all of those. We need to analyze them differently, and we need to share the results in a visual way.
If you’re interested in…
Histograms are a crucial part of Exploratory Data Analysis. They save us from being tricked by something like “On average, our widgets reach 1000 people.” That’s a great average! But what’s the range? Distribution? Standard deviation? Variance? These can all be answered through one simple visualization: a histogram.
But there’s a problem with histograms as they’re typically made: Binning. Time for a PSA:
Stop. Randomly. Binning. Histograms. There’s a way to do it. With math.
Let’s take a leap into being better, more rigorous communicators and think about binning our histograms to realistically reflect the quantitative landscape. Below, I start with the concept of histograms and how they’re important. Then I jump…
Bryce Macher
Driver of content+audience intelligence and personalization ML for a decade+. Distinguished Faculty for Global DataSci @ General Assembly. Motorcycle guy too.
