The Internet is filled with words, and behind every webpage those words are nestled within a hierarchy of HTML tags. Beautiful Soup is a Python library that can pull text from a webpage using those tags, and once you have the text, you can use it as data for Natural…

Including visualizations with running totals and with missing data. — When people need to use a word processor or a spreadsheet but don’t want to pay for Microsoft Word or Excel, they typically turn to Google Docs and Google Sheets. Likewise, if you need to make dashboards of data visualizations but don’t want to sign up for Power BI or…

During the years of Facebook’s ascent, Mark Zuckerberg’s motto was famously, “Move fast and break things.” Well, since those days, a lot has been broken. Despite the various benefits big tech affords our lives, companies’ sole focus on fast growth has meant that ethical considerations of how their products might…

I was recently creating visualizations in Seaborn, which is based on Matplotlib, and when labeling the x-axis, I wasn’t getting the results I was expecting. I decided to take a step back and experiment to see what xticks and xticklabels actually do in a visualization. Let’s break it down. A Basic Plot First…

If you wanted to count the number of characters in a string in Python or otherwise convert a list to a dictionary with each item counted, there are a variety of ways to do it. 1. Import Counter Python has a module called Counter which does exactly this. It creates a Counter object…

Develop an unsupervised learning algorithm to find subject commonalities — After reading a news article — whether the subject matter is U.S. politics, a movie review, or a productivity tip — you can turn to someone else and give them a general idea of what it’s about, right? Or if you read a novel, you can classify it as maybe…

How to use an NLP model to sort incoming messages — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a federal agency that began operations only in 2011, looks after the interests of consumers in the financial sector. As part of that mission, consumers can send in complaints when they feel they’ve been mistreated by a credit bureau, a bank, a credit card…

Say an accident occurred between three vehicles on a September morning. Roads were dry, and the posted speed limit was 35 mph. One of the drivers was a 43-year-old woman. Would this situation lead to a serious accident? Being able to answer a question such as this one was the…

Overview of a data modeling project for Flatiron’s data science course — How much is a home’s price affected by: a recent renovation? 10 additional square feet of living space? other listings for sale in the area? For my data science project for Flatiron School, I used a dataset covering home sales in King County, Washington, in 2014 and 2015 to see…