It is no surprise to anyone that the US healthcare system is incredibly broken, as there are hordes of medical billing nightmare tales on the internet in addition to medical costs being one of the major causes of bankruptcy for many citizens. Defenders of this broken system will often mention that having insurance makes most… Continue reading An Entanglement with US Healthcare
A New Way to “See” Reviews with Word Clouds
Information overload is a very real phenomena as digital and information technology progresses. While companies relish in harvesting personal data for increasingly effective advertising, the individual can rarely make use of the same amount of information. Consider the simple act of choosing a restaurant. Going on Yelp or any review site would be a good… Continue reading A New Way to “See” Reviews with Word Clouds
A Layman’s View of an Agile Environment
Agile Software Development has gained traction in recent years, expanding its foundational values to many sectors outside of tech. For the uninitiated, the plethora of technical jargon can be very intimidating, and those seeking to enter a technical role need to at least have an understanding of an Agile environment. What is Agile? Purists will… Continue reading A Layman’s View of an Agile Environment
A Mathless Breakdown of the Random Forest Classification Algorithm
Review A previous post discussed how the decision tree algorithm classifies items using the gini impurity index--a simple score that is easily calculated. Please visit this post for some background information or a refresher if necessary. Pitfalls of Decision Trees Decision trees are relatively straightforward, regardless whether it is built on the gini impurity index… Continue reading A Mathless Breakdown of the Random Forest Classification Algorithm
Support Vector Machine: The Kernel Trick Explained with Minimal Math
Introduction Support vector machines are supervised learning algorithms that help classify things into different groups. Supposed that the shapes below had to be separated somewhere on the line. Where should the line be drawn? It could be drawn line this, which might allow for some misclassification: In this example, it's pretty intuitive that the dividing… Continue reading Support Vector Machine: The Kernel Trick Explained with Minimal Math
