Eric J Ma's Website

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Always Check Your Data

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-10-31 | tags: bayesian data analysis poisson likelihood statistics data checking sanity check data testing negative infinity event cycle times data bounds central tendency data spread variance quartile range data science lessons learned

Today, I learned a hard lesson about data checking when I spent 1.5 hours trying to fit a Poisson likelihood to negative values 🤦‍♂️. Always sanity check your data for basic stats like bounds, central tendency, and spread. Lesson learned! 😅

Read on... (130 words, approximately 1 minute reading time)
Random Forests: A Good Default Model?

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-10-27 | tags: data science machine learning random forest

Why I think random forests are a great baseline machine learning model.

Read on... (419 words, approximately 3 minutes reading time)
Network Propagation

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-10-22 | tags: network science graph theory programming python code snippets data science

A mini-tutorial on network propagation, and how the math behind it works.

Read on... (799 words, approximately 4 minutes reading time)
PyPy: Impressive!

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-10-11 | tags: python programming optimization

I profiled PyPy against CPython when running NumPy code, and found it to be very competitive! Read on more to find out why.

Read on... (684 words, approximately 4 minutes reading time)
PyData NYC 2017

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-10-10 | tags: pydata conferences python

Things I prospectively hope to learn at PyData NYC 2017!

Read on... (408 words, approximately 3 minutes reading time)
Recursive Programming and DAGs

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-10-10 | tags: programming code snippets

As a data scientist, I routinely find programming skills to be very important. This blog post shows an example of why knowing our data structures and algorithms can really help!

Read on... (857 words, approximately 5 minutes reading time)
A Data Scientist's Guide to Environment Variables

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-10-07 | tags: data science bash environment variables programming

Environment variables might seem mysterious, but hopefully, after reading this blog post, you'll no longer feel that way!

Read on... (1868 words, approximately 10 minutes reading time)
New Habits

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-10-03

Ever since "going corporate", it's meant picking up more new productivity/coding habits. Here's a sampling of what I've learned.

(1) Living by my calendar

Basically, the "work calendar" defines... (read more)

(468 words, approximately 3 minutes reading time)
Visualize Large Datasets by Sampling

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-09-14

Just a little tip, putting it here for myself and others in case it helps.

Sometimes, you need to visualize a large dataset, but it takes a ton of time to render it or compute the necessary transforms.

If your samples are... (read more)

(157 words, approximately 1 minute reading time)
nano text editor hacks

written by Eric J. Ma on 2017-09-11 | tags: programming nano text editor coding snippets

Much as I've embraced the Atom text editor, there are times when the GUI isn't accessible to us, and we are forced to use a Terminal-based text editor.

Now, I'm not one of those crazy types who use emacs or vim... (read more)

(396 words, approximately 2 minutes reading time)
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