This is a presentation I gave for prospective students at Flatiron School. It was meant as an engaging introductory example that demonstrated some of the potentially cool and interesting insights students could draw after only a month or two of intesive work at the bootcamp. As such, this talk covered a wide variety of topics from the basic data science workflow, APIs, http requests, natural language processing and visualization. Despite the wide range of topics (including some fairly complex ones with Latent Dirchlet Allocation), the talk is meant to be accessible to a wide audience and demonstrate just how powerful newbie data scientists can be with the proper guidance and modularization of knowledge. With that, I hope you enjoy and start to get a glimpse at both the power and accessability of many modern day data science workflows!

Analyzing NY Times Articles

In this mini demo, we’ll acquire some recent New York Times articles regarding politics and categorize them into general topics using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Afterwards, we’ll visualize these results as some nifty little word clouds like this:

With that, let’s briefly take a look at a standard data science workflow, as well as an outline for this particular project.

General Data Science Outline

Our Outline

Much of the country is still in shock given the recent election, and with that I thought it appropriate to spend a little time creating a d3 visualization for the exploratory analysis I conducted a few months ago concerning how the primaries might be predictive of the general election.

Click here to see the interactive version and source code!

Quite a few of us are worried about the upcoming election. Certainly this year has been unique with candidates such as Sanders and Trump encroaching on the two party dominated system. With all of that, everyone’s question is who will win in November? Could there really be a Trump presidency? Some like Michael Moore in his article “5 Reasons Trump Will Win” insist that we are doomed and site evidence such as the booming Republican primary turnout as an indication that there may be a similar upset come November. Others such as David Brooks, Politifact and Five Thirty Eight claim that there is simply no relationship between the primaries and the general election. Certainly this is no light matter, and as Brexit demonstrated, we cannot assume an outcome to be impossible. Yet the question remains, is there a relationship between primary turnout and the subsequent general election?

Here’s a brief exploration into the realm of traffic on the MTA. We all know there’s traffic on the 4,5,6 but just how do those numbers stack up to the rest of the city? More specifically, I investigated a hypothetical scenario for street outreach to wealthy donors. Yes, perhaps this is a misguided cause to start with. After all, how many wealthy donors will you really successfully solicit on the street or at subway stations? Nonetheless, this initial analysis could prove fruitful for determining preliminary target areas and more marketing research on how to best approach potential donors could then be conducted.