D-Lab

You have gathered the needed data to support your research, check. You have made some hypotheses about what you hope to conclude, check. You have spent time cleaning the data and organizing it in a manner that permits further exploration, check. You have sliced and diced the data with...Read more about Scrollytelling through a look at food prices around the world

For many data science problems, there is a need to estimate unknown information from a sequence of observed events. You may want to know, for instance, whether a person is angry or happy, given a sequence of brain scans taken while playing a video game. Or you may be digitizing...Read more about A brief primer on Hidden Markov Models

When working with spatial networks, both ArcGIS and Python packages such as NetworkX and...Read more about Working with spatial networks

Last week marked the D-Lab’s inaugural “Excel Fundamentals” workshop, and to celebrate I am sharing one of my favorite Excel functions: INDEX-MATCH-MATCH. By combining the INDEX and MATCH functions, we can create a faster and more flexible lookup than the typical approach with...Read more about Excel Fundamentals: Lookups with INDEX-MATCH-MATCH

How to deal with datasets that are larger than our computer’s memory? Do we still need to learn Structured Query Language (SQL) to create and manage a database?

As an incipient data analyst, one of my first major challenges was to build and manage a...Read more about dbplyr: do we still need to learn SQL to create and manage databases?

This post describes our work presented at the CHI 2020 Networked Privacy Workshop, a collaboration by a team of researchers affiliated with the UC...Read more about Analyzing the Perceptions of Cybersecurity Risks in Civil Society Organizations: A Survey Approach

What can state government do…to attract a data scientist like YOU?

By Kellie Hogue

What’s your next move? When I was in grad school, one of my professors told me that regardless of the job I am currently in, I should always be...Read more about What can state government do…to attract a data scientist like YOU?

Understanding Rock Climbing using Python & SQL

By Sean Perez

The Rise of Climbing

As an avid rock climber, I’ve been curious about how climbing became so popular in such a brief time, and what these climbers look...Read more about Understanding Rock Climbing using Python & SQL

Introduction to Pareto

While not as well-known as the bell-shaped Normal (Gaussian) distribution, the Pareto distribution is a powerful tool for modeling a variety of real-life phenomena. It is named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848-...Read more about Explaining the 80-20 Rule with the Pareto Distribution