May 2013 – Page 2 – DECISION STATS

How to make inforgraphics easily- Use Infogr.am

What is an Infographic?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infographic

Information graphics or infographics are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly.^[1]^[2] They can improve cognition by utilizing graphics to enhance the human visual system’s ability to see patterns and trends.^[3]^[4] The process of creating infographics can be referred to as data visualization, information design, or information architecture.^[2]

What is Infogr.am?

It Create infographics and interactive online charts. It’s free and super-easy!

How?

Step 1

Step 2

Create

Step 3

Choose New Infographic or New Chart?

Step 4

Create using options-you can edit the table, figures, text, colors etc

That’s it

Use Infogr.am to make inforgraphics easily!

Coursera gets cluttered

I am a big fan of Coursera, but I really think they should organize the Courses along tracks for people wanting to gain multiple skills for a domain or a career.

Their current system of tracks is a signature track that at 39/69$ offers a certificate. Can’t this be upgraded to something like a Data Scientist certification – say if you complete 5-6 courses that are specified.

Also there needs to be much more external social (rather than internal social /forums discussion) as well as some gamification like Codeacademy does (points, badges, leaderboard) to make it more fun.

Lastly- I wish there was a way to read the transcripts fast or at least some way for professionals who are busy to change the rate of learning (the video speed can be changed but its not that effective)

See this- with 370 courses I think Coursera should really build a layer of certifications for multiple courses along a single industry/domain.

Goa Goa Gone Review

Go Goa Gone, is both a stoner movie combined with a zombies attack setting in the scenic heaven of Goa, India. As such it is a sharp, taut comedy with nice acting and crisp direction . The humor is bawdy but some dialogues have potential to be classic. A small budget movie- this is one nice production and shows Bollywood innovating global storylines and adding some desi masala to it. The newbie Puja Gupta looks hot, Saif Ali Khan lampoons the tough guy with a gun image, and Kunal Khemu and Vir Das are great in comic timing.

Watch it for laughs, though it is probably unsuitable for a family outing or with kids. Clearly inspired the cult Hollywood Movie, Zombieland- it has its own desi spin on it. Spicy and Delicious!

Star Trek Movie Review Descending Into Darkness to go where no one has descended before

JJ Abrahams confronts age old questions of morality and ethics in a recent context ( should dangerous war criminals face trial or be executed?). The bromance between Kirk and Spock grows, we see Mr Spock showing more emotions here than he did in the entire Series (including a hilarious domestic incident). This is an awesome feast of a movie and straight in the summer’s must watch list. I liked it better than Iron Man 3 ( and I liked Iron Man a lot!!). The 3D and CGI enhances rather than distracts the movie story, which is how it should be. A satisfying Star Trek, and lots of potential!

But Benedict Cumberbatch is the real bully. This guy is an awesome and incredible actor! Trekkies should remember the original Khan! With some roles swapped 😉

Hallelujah! If you cant find time to watch this edition of Star Trek- it is time to turn that geek badge in!!

1-click Random Decision Forests

The Official Blog of BigML.com

One of the pitfalls of machine learning is that creating a single predictive model has the potential to overfit your data. That is, the performance on your training data might be very good, but the model does not generalize well to new data. Ensemble learning of decision trees, also referred to as forests or simply ensembles, is a tried-and-true technique for reducing the error of single machine-learned models. By learning multiple models over different subsamples of your data and taking a majority vote at prediction time, the risk of overfitting a single model to all of the data is mitigated. You can read more about this in our previous post.

Early this year, we showed how BigML ensembles outperform their solo counterparts and even beat other machine learning services. However, up until now creating ensembles with BigML has only been available via our API. We are excited to announce that ensembles are now available via our…

View original post 869 more words

A SunBurst of Insight

a nice addition to Big Data Visualization- sunbursts (which I have covered in the Dat Viz chapter of my R book)

Great work by BigML.com

The Official Blog of BigML.com

This is a guest post by David Gerster (@gerster), a data scientist and investor in BigML.

I work at a consumer web company, and recently used BigML to understand what drives return visits to our site. I followed Standard Operating Procedure for data mining, sampling a group of users, dividing them into two classes, and creating several features that I hoped would be useful in predicting these classes. I then fed this training data to BigML, which quickly and obediently produced a decision tree:

Next I used BigML’s interface to examine the tree’s many subsets, shown as “nodes” in the diagram above. I moused over a node at the top of the tree and saw that it achieved high separation for a large fraction of the training set:

This one node covered 58% of the data, and separated the two classes with 73% confidence. (“Confidence” is a measure…

View original post 546 more words

Predictive Analytics World goes to Chicago

Message from our Sponsors and my favorite Analytics conference ( only if I could attend a cool analytics conference nearby in Asia (singapore/turkey?) -sighs) Even useR wont come to Asia ever?-

This is the number 1 conference for analytics in the world and it is next month in Chicago, USA? So you think you have the best analytics software or product or service. Here is where you can find it out!

It’s time to amp-up your analytics strategy. It’s time to beef up your analytics strategy by attending Predictive Analytics World Chicago, June 10-13, 2013. With over 30 case studies from leading organizations across a spectrum of industries, this is the must-attend event for anyone serious about their analytics strategy.

Here’s what your peers had to say about their experience at PAW:

“Great speakers, interesting content, and great networking. PAW conferences are among my favorite analytic events!”
– Karl Rexer, Ph.D. Rexer Analytics“This vendor neutral conference always gives me tangible ideas I can put to work right away.”
– Greg Hayworth, Humana

“Predictive Analytics World did a great job keeping up with the trends in Predictive Modeling. There were also plenty of opportunities to learn about the most valuable resources available to data scientists.”
– Conor Sontag, Marketing Evolution

“People who are in analytics must join Predictive Analytics World and see the state of the art projects.”
– Burak Buyuktombak, Avea Telecommunication Services (Turkey)

And there is more where that came from.

Who’s attending PAW Chicago 2013?

Here are just a few of the many companies attending:

Whose attending PAW Chicago