I recently did a project that involved merging datasets on names which had slightly different transcriptions for the same person. Some names were spelled wrong, included a nickname, middle name or suffix which didn’t match across datasets. In this case, I used the a string matching package, Fuzzywuzzy, to merge on the correct names.

In order to save you a lot of the extra work I did before merging, I want to explain the modules, methods and uses of Fuzzywuzzy that you can use.

Fuzzywuzzy’s Distance Calculations

Fuzzywuzzy calculates distance is using Levenshtein distance which, in short form, determines how many changes you…

Thinking of a project for my capstone, I knew I loved the idea of exploring language and its accessibility to readers, which is likely good context to my experience as an ESL teacher.

As I was sitting in class, my instructor briefly pulled up Kaggle to show us a homework. While he scrolled, something caught my eye- CommonLit Readability Prize: Rate the complexity of literary passages for grades 3–12 classroom use.

I was so interested that I went back to the competition to look at its description.

Can machine learning identify the appropriate reading level of a passage of text…

Data Science: It’s Not just Math and Robots

With a background in Linguistics and Psychology, I get questions on why I chose Data Science for my career change!

Long ago, I thought Data Science was for economists who predicted the stock market or computer scientists who built Artificially Intelligent Robots. However, Data Science is simply a tool for any field that can find patterns to make predictions; it can be applied to anything!

Here are some of my favorite Data Science applications that helped me understand the depth and breadth of Data Science:

• True Crime: One man predicted serial killers…

An app that predicts how annoyed you are about to be at upcoming traffic and prepares you by playing calming music.

A webscraper to find Airbnb listings that meet my criteria and includes the cleaning and added fees in the price.

Get ideas for, gather and organize vacation itineraries based on the type of experiences, not the location, food, etc.

A camera that monitors my plants and tells me when and how they need to be helped so my plants actually survive this time.

Give me recommendations for hobbies that can take my feedback on why I would or wouldn’t…

I am two weeks and one project into my Data Science bootcamp and 10 weeks from graduation. I know it will go by quickly and the journey is as important as the end result. I want to document how I feel so I remember what it took to achieve.

On the first day of class, one of my instructors said to us, “you made it, even though this is the start, there are people who want to be in your position.” Looking back, this is not the beginning of my career change. It took me over a year: career path…