My progress in data science

Capstone

My current thoughts for my Capstone:

Idea #1: Self Driving Cars

I was looking at this medium article by Max Deutsch and it seems like the thought behind the computer vision of a self driving car is to take an image and be able to identify where the lane lines are and draw lines over them.

From there the idea is to use that info in order to teach the car how to steer.

My current thoughts are that we could use the height of the front facing camera (or cameras) and use features of perspective in order to measure how far away horizontally the lane lines are. And if the distance to the right land and to the left lane are equal, then the car is in the middle of the lane.

The way I’m thinking of it is kind of like a trompe l’oeil Renaissance painting but in reverse… So going from the perspective to measurements that the computer can understand.

Trompe l’oeil example from https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/art-history-101-trompe-loeil

Idea #2: Cryptocurrency

This thought still needs to be fleshed out. I know I do not want to do something about pricing but rather to either help in the development of the blockchain / cryptocurrencies or their applications.

Inspired by this post on the Towards Data Science blog, I would lean more towards analyzing data on the blockchain to provide insights for business.

But again, this needs further exploration. I also plan to flesh out one more idea for my final project at General Assembly and will post further updates to the blog. It will probably be something Art or Sports related though but we’ll see.

Data Viz & Tableau

I am starting a new section where I attempt to learn Tableau and improve on my data visualizations. My thought process here is I want to work on my data viz skills and this blog is a way to keep me honest and keep on progressing.

My first visualizations were inspired from a competition on Kaggle where you are tasked to predict every shot make or miss that Kobe Bryant took throughout his career.

I’ve seen the work of Kirk Goldsberry before and decided since I want to learn Tableau anyway, why not try and make some quick visualizations.

I used this website for inspiration on how to begin making Kirk Goldsberry style shot charts for NBA players.

First thing I just realized that I need to learn is how to export an image from Tableau because the Worksheet>Export drop down option and the Worksheet>Copy drop down option are greyed out and not available…

So for now I’m saving a bad screenshot of a bad image. I guess I have to start somewhere and hopefully this process only goes up from here.

Tips

One quick tip for today:

In Jupyter notebook when having to replace everything in a cell (like when editing a function for example) you can either:

1. Hold Control and click on everywhere you want to change, and change them all at the same time… or
2. Go to edit> Find and Replace and you can change everything in the cell.