My friend, Josh Jacquet, and I competed in the DMA’s 2016 Analytics Challenge (powered by EY) and placed 4th out of the 50 entrants. Given that the majority of the other contestants were agencies vying for a little exposure, I think we did well.
Summary: Clean Code is a clear guide to writing better software which can be applied to data mining and SQL queries. The Pragmatic Programmer is a more detailed but slightly more antiquated book. Code Complete is a massive tome full of specific guidance.
Summary: The US Census provides an API that lets you query any of their datasets. Includes population by race, gender, age, and more by zip code, state, congressional district, and a few other geographies.
Summary: The caret package was developed by Max Kuhn and contains a handful of great functions that help with parameter tuning. Purpose of the caret Package The caret package lets you quickly automate model tuning. Using a training and holdout sample, the caret package trains a model you provide and returns the optimal model based […]
Summary: Keep analyses organized with a directory that supports exploratory and production results (scripts, visualizations, and models) and keep data immutable. Use a tool like CookieCutter Data Science to automatically build a directory structure.
