Office Hours Archive

A newsletter archive and assorted course posts

Newsletter vol 13

author
Brandon Rohrer
07 April, 2021
k-nearest neighbors case study with diamond prices I shared a new case study, a working example of k-nearest neighbors in Cottonwood. It is based on a classic data set of diamond prices, and uses the stones' characteristics, like dimensions, weight, and color, to estimate their...

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Newsletter vol 12

author
Brandon Rohrer
17 March, 2021
I may have fake numbered you This week I discovered my return email address was set wrong. 😬 If you sent me an email and I didn't write back, please send it again. This time to [email protected] Fun with scatterplots These are all my best secrets for massaging a story out of a...

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Newsletter vol 11

author
Brandon Rohrer
05 March, 2021
Data Science reading lists I confess, when I see an exhaustive list of books it usually makes me feel overwhelmed. Where am I going to find the time to read them all? But I love it when people call out their favorites. A lot of you did exactly that on Twitter and LinkedIn. Some of these...

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Newsletter vol 10

21 February, 2021
Machine Learning in production The world doesn’t sit still. ML models by default assume it does. Cats won’t grow more legs, but cameras will grow more pixels. This will break out-of-the-box convolutional neural networks trying to classify them. New words are invented. The accepted meanings...

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Newsletter vol 9

author
Brandon Rohrer
13 February, 2021
Book recommendations I get asked about book recommendations a lot. Here are two. If you want an up to date Python-based tour of RL, I don't know of a better book than Mastering Reinforcement Learning with Python by Enes Bilgin. Take a look inside and see what you think. Grokking...

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Newsletter vol 8

author
Brandon Rohrer
07 February, 2021
Penguins The Palmer Penguins data set is a thing of beauty! A sincere thank you to Allison Horst, Alison Presmanes Hill, and Kristen B. Gorman for crafting it. It's a pleasure to work with and very well documented. Artwork by @allison_horst And thanks to Parul Pandey for putting a csv...

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Newsletter vol 7

author
Brandon Rohrer
31 January, 2021
Animations from sorting algorithms This happy thread is the creation of Matteo Portesi. He took a variety of sorting algorithms and used some Matplotlib magic to illustrate their operation. I know I should be fascinated by the algorithmic machinations as I watch them, but mostly they're just...

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Newsletter vol 6

author
Brandon Rohrer
19 January, 2021
Data heroes In addition to Rebekah Jones' ongoing fight to tell the truth about COVID-19 infection rates in Florida, Census whistleblowers have pushed back against pressure from the director to put out a report they describe as "statistically indefensible", which is statistician speak for "a...

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Newsletter vol 5

author
Brandon Rohrer
09 January, 2021
Office Hours, vol 5 Happy New Year! Dancing robots I unapologetically love robots. Please enjoy this technical feat from Boston Dynamics in celebration of the end of 2020. Googlers unite Congratulations to our colleagues at Google for kicking off the Alphabet Workers Union. It will...

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Newsletter vol 4

author
Brandon Rohrer
02 January, 2021
This week, I wanted to devote the newsletter to answering some thoughtful questions from Sahil Juneja (robotics, ML, and content developer) about content creation. Do you face any creative blockages when developing content? What would you suggest to handle them? I hit a couple of different...

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ABOUT

Welcome to the Office Hours Archive.

This is a space for back issues of the newsletter and informal conversations within the End-to-End Machine Learning community. It’s a safe space. Civility is the rule. All honest questions are fair game.

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