My Journey Through Data

     Hello Everyone!      I recently watched another Ted Talk titled  “The human insights missing from big data,” by Tricia Wang, and wanted to write about what I thought about it. In her talk, as the title suggests, she discusses how big data cannot do justice to the task of predicting patterns, and that human insight (or what she calls "thick data") combined with quantifiable data will elevate the performance of companies and nonprofits, making them more profitable and more robust in the face of the future.  What Wang Discusses In 2009, Wang took up a research role at Nokia, when the company was dominating the emerging markets of the cellphone industry. Wang talks about her experience in an urban slum in China, where she spent years selling dumplings to construction workers, learning about the kids' habits, and gathering quantifiable data on the population. Piecing together all she had learned, she discovered something the wide array of Nokia's ...

Hello everyone! I recently watched a great Ted Talk by Mallory Freeman titled "Your company's data could help end world hunger." In it, she describes her experiences in optimizing trade routes to reduce food costs and, consequently, feed more people. How did she do this? She used data to build a model that identifies the optimal route for food. Freeman's accomplishments are built on data. Without it, she wouldn't be able to make a model to feed thousands more individuals. She is a firm believer that "information visibility drives efficiency." So she proposes three advancements that would benefit humanitarian organizations, tailored to how companies share and manage their internal data and analytics teams. Companies should: Share data with humanitarian organizations Lend their data scientists/decision scientists who can clean and model data Share their new innovations/technologies to allow for more data collection Freeman closes her talk discu...

Hello everyone!  My experience in the Coding School National High School Research Program has concluded, and I've completed my research on the impact of cut, color, clarity, and carat weight on a diamond's overall value. I'd also like to extend a special thank you to The Coding School and my mentor, Sujay Shetty, for all the fantastic guidance; your help made this possible. Why I Did This Project  I wanted to explore product pricing and how items could be priced based on their key characteristics. While I didn't immediately think diamonds would be my topic of choice, it became fascinating once I delved deep into the subject. My dataset, sourced from Kaggle, has over 50,000 entries, making EDA incredibly worthwhile for uncovering trends. As I delved deeper into the data, my curiosity only grew, and h ere's  what I discovered .  What I Found Using methods described in my paper, I found that around 90% of level changes for the 3Cs significantly affected price; however,...

I've been in the Data Science Research Program hosted by The Coding School, where I've learned a ton about the data science process.  Here's the process in case you're interested: 1.  Data Cleaning : removed null and missing values, filtering price outliers that skewed the data. 2.  Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) : a viewing phase where you look for cool insights in the data that you can explore through functions, plots, and further visualization techniques.  3.  Statistical Analysis : Developing a null and alternative hypothesis, basically just a claim through the data that does not correlate (Ex, People who study more will not have a significantly higher grade on the final exam) and one that correlates (Ex, People who study more will have a significantly higher grade on the final exam). We can test for significance using a variety of tests, including T-tests, ANOVA, and Tukey's HSD. This will help you decide whether to approve/reject the null hypothesis based...

Hello people! Recently, I visited businesses in Brookline to better understand how policies are affecting them. I asked a wide range of local shops to better represent the diverse Brookline landscape, including restaurants (casual and sit-down), cafes, specialty stores, and supermarkets. While I cannot provide specific information about some of the businesses in my sample due to a desire to remain anonymous, what I have below is data worth looking into more deeply. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Data --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Now What? I will delve deeper into my interpretation of this data in a future blog post. Analyzing this could help me understand the disparit...

Hello, and thank you for checking out my blog! My name is Avyaya, a student at Brookline High School in Massachusetts. As you probably noticed from the title of my blog, I am interested in data, particularly how it can affect and change our lives. Through policy, I aim to convey my thoughts on these topics through a data-driven lens. This is my first blog post, but I have a lot I want to discuss, documenting my learning, and delving deeper into other topics I love. However, today, I want to address an issue that's currently affecting Brookline. Tariffs have affected the place I call home, affecting local businesses that remain special to the community.  For some background, Brookline is a suburb of Boston. It's technically a town, but it's a city, with its unique local shops, vibrant culture, and diverse community. The area features a range of environments, from the quiet, peaceful south, with large homes, lovely parks, and a population of older retirees, to the bustling no...