There are many mistakes that can be made in data science, many of which can go unnoticed for a while. The reason is that unlike coding bugs, these mistakes don't throw an error or an exception, making them harder to spot and fix, as a result. In my view, the biggest such mistake is that of thinking that one aspect of data science is so significantly better than the others that the latter don't matter much. I used to think like that back in PhD days (my thesis was on Machine Learning and heuristics) but fortunately, I discovered the error of my thinking and started broadening my perspective on this matter, something I continue to do as I learn more about this fascinating field.

Let's look into this more closely. For starters, there are several frameworks or tool-kits available in data science today, ranging from Statistics to Machine Learning, and lately, A.I. based models. All of them have their own set of advantages as well as limitations. Many Machine Learning models, for example, particularly A.I. based ones (mainly ANNs) are very hard to interpret and are often referred to as black boxes. Stats models, on the other hand, may be easy to interpret, but they may not be as accurate, while they tend to have a number of assumptions which may not always hold true. That's why claiming that one of these frameworks or tool-kits is the best one at the expense of others is a very shaky position.

However, with all the hype around the latest and greatest Deep Learning methods (and other A.I. based models used in Data Science), it's difficult to argue against this position. Also, with Statistics having such a good reputation in academia and proven applicability across different domains, it's also hard to argue that it's not as good a framework. This may be good in a way since it keeps us humble, but it may also obstruct progress. How can you have the nerve to put forward something new if it doesn't comply with what is considered "the best" or if it doesn't comply with the traditional approaches to data learning, such as Statistical Learning?

I'm not claiming to have a solution to this conundrum, by the way, and perhaps it's not something that can be answered simply. However, this kind of riddles that plague the data science field are what can be good food for thought and bring about a sense of genuine wonder about the prospects and the future of data science. Maybe when someone asks us what the best framework of data science is it's better to say "I don't know" and consider using different ones in tandem, instead of flocking into this or the other group of people who have made up their minds about this, and who are unlikely to ever change it. After all, open-mindedness is something that never gets old, at least not in a truly scientific field.

Being open-minded is a key trait of any scientist, since the beginning of Science. The scientific method is basically a practice that relies on open-mindedness, focusing on testing a hypothesis based on the evidence at hand. However, nowadays there is a trend towards a heretic behavior (in lack of a better word) when it comes to the science of data, as well as the application of A.I. in it.

Open-mindedness is not just being open about the results of an experiment though. That’s easy. Being open to other people’s ideas and beliefs is also important. It’s easy to dismiss some people, especially those writing about this matter, even though they lack the training you may have on the field. Still, those people may have some interesting insights, which they often express in their articles. You don’t have to agree with them, in order to gain from this, expanding your perspective. However, dismissing an article because it makes use of this or the other term (which in your opinion is not that relevant to the topic they tackle) is closed-minded.

That’s not to say that we should accept everything we read, however. Some of the material out there is of low informational value and can be biased towards this or the other technology, for various reasons. That’s normal since the field of data science (as well as A.I. to some extent) is closely linked to the business world and is influenced by the dynamics of the markets of tools and frameworks related to data analytics.

So, what do we do about all this? For starters, we can read an article before we dismiss it as irrelevant or otherwise problematic. Also, if we don’t agree about something with the author, we can construct arguments against that point and express them without attacking the other person. There are people who are incredibly toxic to the field and pose a threat to the field, by propagating their erroneous beliefs, but fortunately, these are few. Also, they are probably beyond salvation, since they have too large a following to ever question their beliefs. Still, by going against their propaganda, we can still help the people who haven’t made up their minds yet on the topic.

Perhaps that’s why the most important thing you can learn about data science and A.I. is to have a mindset that is congruent to your development as a professional, always maintaining an open mind. Just because there are fanatics in this field who are getting paid way more than they should and maintain a large following due to their charisma, it doesn’t mean that this is the best way to go. It’s not easy to be open-minded in a place where fanaticism thrives, but in the long run, it’s a viable strategy. After all, data science is here to stay, in one form or another, while the views on it that are now popular are bound to change.

It's quite enjoyable and insightful to learn about A.I., particularly NLP, as well as other data science related topics. However, with so vast a knowledge-base related to this topic, it's equally easy to forget a lot of what you learn. Enter this quiz that can help you recap the most important points of Natural Language Processing in a fun way,  without the stress the often accompanies quizzes in educational institutes, for example. This is an experimental kind of video so it may still need some refinement, something I'm going to look into in the near future. In the meantime, you can check out this quiz video on NLP  here. Enjoy!

Note that this video is published on the Safari platform, O'Reilly's online library of sorts, where various publishers can exhibit their creations in digital format. In order to take full advantage of this, however, you'll need to have an account since it's a subscription-based site.

It's funny how when you think you know something, you often discover that you don't know it that much. This is particularly the case in data science, a field that holds more mystery than most people think. For example, a great deal of heuristics and models are based on the idea of similarity and there have been developed several metrics to gauge the latter. Many of them are based on distances but others are more original, in various ways.

During my exploration of the hidden aspects of data science (my favorite hobby), I came across the idea of a similarity metric that is not subject to dimensionality constraints, like all of the distance-based ones, while also fast and easy to calculate. Also, this is something original that I haven't encountered anywhere else and I've looked around quite a bit, especially when I was writing the book "Data Science Mindset, Methodologies and Misconceptions" where I talk about similarity metrics briefly.

Anyway, I cannot explain it in detail here because this metric makes use of operators and heuristics that are themselves original, part of my new frameworks of data analytics. Let's just say that it makes use of Math in a way that seems familiar and comprehensible, but has not been used before. Also, it yields values in [0, 1], with 1 being completely similar and 0 being completely dissimilar.  The idea is to find a way to gauge similarity from different perspectives and combine the result, something that would unfortunately only work if the data is properly normalized. Given that all conventional ways of normalizing data are inherently flawed, this metric is bound to work only in properly normalized data spaces. Because such spaces are more or less balanced (even if they have outliers), the average similarity of all the data points in them is always around 0.5 (neutral similarity), something that makes the metric very easy to interpret.

As with other metrics and heuristics, it's not they themselves that are the most important thing, but the doors they open, revealing new possibilities (e.g. a new kind of discernibility metric). That's why I found the picture of the fractal above quite relevant since it is all about self-similarity, a concept that led us to the discovery of a new kind of Mathematics related to Chaos. Interestingly, even with such advanced knowledge, we are unable to fully comprehend the chaos that reigns modern A.I. systems, something that has its own set of problems. So, I ask you to wonder for a moment how much better A.I. would be if it were developed using comprehensible heuristics, making it transparent and interpretable. Perhaps its thinking patterns wouldn't be as dissimilar to ours and we wouldn't see it as much of a threat.

As experience and knowledge accumulate in our minds, it’s increasingly easy to lose touch of that original spark that brought us into this journey of learning, in the fascinating field of data science. I’m referring to that sense of wonder that made all this otherwise dry know-how of math, programming, and data, something we could lose sleep over. Because if you are really in a state of wonder, it’s easy to forget to eat, postpone other tasks, and even find sleep somewhat less important, when your other option is delving more into the learning of the craft.

A sense of wonder, however, is much more than curiosity or even interest in data science. It is all that, but it’s also a way of feeling, a higher sentiment if you will. Being at wonder is what incites wondering and going into more depth. It is what makes a seemingly mundane task, such as data cleaning, appear intriguing and valuable. It is what makes learning about a new model something truly interesting, not just as a memory-based activity, but also as something that sparks imagination and innovation. It is wonder that makes us ask “what if?” instead of just being content with what is presented to us.

Naturally, this sense of wonder is fleeting, just like the perspective we have as newcomers to data science. The more we learn, the more limited our wanderings in the vast knowledge that the field entails, since being more focused on specific tasks and time frames are of the essence. That’s normal since as data scientists we need to be practical and akin to the way the world works, otherwise, we’d be unemployable. Yet, at a certain point of aptitude and understanding of the craft, it is this sense of wonder that enables us to go further and grow beyond what we are expected to be.

The sense of wonder can be cultivated through a sincere wish to become better for the sake of being better, a wish nourished by our love for data science. Ambition can only take us so far, plus after a while, it can become stressful. Wanting to become better because of a lasting motivation is therefore essential for bringing about the sense of wonder. However, we also need to make time for it and allocate resources to such endeavors. Learning through a book or a crash course may be efficient but it’s what we do beyond this that enables us to learn deeply and cultivate the sense of wonder. Liaising with people who already have this sense strong in them, such as beginners who are dedicated learners of the craft, can be a great aid too. Finally, we need to think about the craft and experiment with new ideas. If we just rely on what this or the other expert says, we are bound to be limited by them. We need to study existing ideas, but also dare to venture beyond them, exploring new models and new metrics. Most of them are bound to yield nowhere but some of them are bound to work and help us look at data science from a different angle.

Cultivating a sense of wonder isn’t easy and it’s an ongoing challenge. However, through it, new perspectives come about (such as some of the stuff I talk about in this blog periodically) while the connectedness of the various aspects of the field becomes apparent. All in all, it’s this perspective that makes the field truly wonderful, much more than a line of work. That’s something to wonder about...

I've talked about mentoring quite a bit lately, as well as in a video of mine available on Safari. Although this topic is not that much in vogue these days, I'd like to say a few more things about it and why it is relevant in data science and A.I. these days, perhaps more than ever.

First of all, mentoring is good for both parties and it can even be profitable. Although it's doubtful you'll be rich by being a mentor, you have a lot to gain in terms of a deeper understanding of the craft, once you start explaining concepts for your mentees, while there is the opportunity to revive the "beginner's mind" through this whole experience. If you are a mentee, you'll save lots of time when learning data science / A.I. since your mentor will answer your queries and even guide you towards the resources you need. If the mentor is good, they may even help you develop the mindset of data science, something that's hard to do on your own.

Also, if you are part of the Thinkful online school, you have a whole set of benefits too. As a mentor, you'll have an easier time finding a mentee and even get paid to mentor them. Also, you'll have a structured learning path, through the corresponding data science courses, so that your mentee won't need you for everything since the platform provides him/her with plenty of resources for all the basics of data science. As a mentee of the Thinkful school, you'll have access to vetted data science professionals who will help you learn, while your mentor can help you further through tailored hands-on advice and guidance through your data science learning.

On another note, through mentoring, you get to have a chance to stay grounded, regardless of your role in this partnership. As a mentor, it's easy to get detached from the world, due to the more high-level way of experiencing the craft, while as a mentee it's easy to get lost in the math or programming side of things. Mentoring helps you stay close to the essence of the field, which has to do with how it is applied and the various methodologies involved in its use.

Interestingly, with today's web technologies, it's easy to experience mentoring wherever you are, as long as you have a reliable internet connection and a decent computer, particularly one with a webcam. Although mentoring in person is generally better, you don't have to depend on physical proximity in order to mentor or be mentored in the fascinating field of data science.

In the previous article, I talked about the dichotomy of Student – Mentee in a data science context. However, it’s really the dichotomy of teacher – Mentor that is at the root of all this, while the data science field itself has a role to play too, something many learners of the craft have forgotten. In this article, we’ll explore just that, in an attempt to gain a better perspective of how true learning works and what it takes to connect to the essence of this fascinating field that’s being tainted by the ones who see it as merely a career-boosting opportunity.

Although there is nothing wrong with the role of a professor in any field, especially the fields of science, it’s important to highlight a distinct difference between a professor and a mentor. The former is usually geared towards giving a set of lectures, in order to fulfill the requirements of his/her professional position, something that may or may not be adequate for conveying the essence of the field, especially for a field as complex as data science. It’s not that the professor doesn’t care for all this, but the nature of this profession makes it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to do this justice. After all, most of these professional educators have other priorities, such as their research.

Mentors, on the other hand, help others learn about data science, not because it’s our job, but because we care about the field, while we have other sources of income to cover our daily expenses. Of course, we may still have monetary benefits linked to mentoring, but it’s generally not the key motivation of all this. Also, we share knowledge about the field based on our own experience, rather than some curriculum which may not always align with the field. Finally, the connection with the people we help (mentees) is more direct and tailored to their needs, rather than generic and impersonal.

It’s important to note that these two roles although different, may still have an overlap. There are professors who can act as mentors, though they usually do this outside the classroom, as in the case of their supervisory role for a PhD student. Also, someone can be a mentor and yet also work part-time in a university. So, it’s good to maintain a flexible view of this whole matter.

Anyway, if you are willing to learn data science in depth, it’s definitely better to do so through a mentor, particularly one with a diversity of experiences in the field. But what about the mentor himself? Where does he learn about all this? In many cases, a mentor may have another mentor to learn from, though it is also possible that the data science field itself is that person’s mentor. After all, data science is a living field, dynamic and ever-changing, with plenty of things to teach to those who are willing to learn from it. Many of its secrets have been discovered but there is still a lot that it’s uncharted territory. That’s something data science can teach anyone who is willing to learn from it. All it takes is a solid understanding of the fundamentals, a strong sense of discipline, and the open-mindedness to abandon what you know for what you can know if you maintain a beginner’s mind...

I've talked about mentoring in the past and what a good mentee looks like. Here I'd like to highlight the differences between a student and a mentee since it's easy to confuse the two.

First of all, a student is someone who is generally more passive than a mentee. The latter takes initiative and feels responsible for her progress in the field of study. The former often outsources this to the instructor(s) and focuses more on passing exams rather than actually learning.

In addition, a mentee has a closer connection with the person helping him learn, namely the mentor. The student's relationship with his instructors is more impersonal, mainly because the latter have lots of students to deal with and can't usually focus on every single one unless it's for their dissertation project or something. The mentor, however, is more dedicated to getting to know the mentee better and coach him accordingly.

Moreover, the mentee-mentor relationship is beyond academia, even though it can exist in a university too (e.g. in the case of a PhD program). More often than not, mentees and mentors are working professionals, while the former tends to already have a degree.

Furthermore, mentees tend to have a more focused approach to learning, usually related to a specific field, much like an apprentice. The student, on the other hand, may study lots of different fields, as part of her curriculum at the college or university.

Interestingly, although there are several university courses on Data Science these days, most people who learn the craft, tend to do so either independently or through the help of a mentor. Perhaps there is something to this, other than a coincidence. That's not to say that university courses are bad, but oftentimes learning data science as a mentee tends to be more cost-effective and efficient, time-wise.

What are your thoughts and experiences on the matter?

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what information is in a data science context, partly because of a couple of projects I’m involved in, and partly because that’s what I enjoy thinking about in my leisure time. After all, there are people who care about data science in a deeper way, as it’s more than a profession for them, something that commands a certain level of dedication that others may not comprehend. As I’m one of those people, I can attest to the unique beauty of the field and the qualities of it that keep it evergreen and ever-interesting.

For the longest time, I was under the impression that it’s the data points or the features that contain the information in a dataset. After all, that’s what most data science sources imply and something that makes some intuitive sense. However, lately I’ve experimented with new algorithms that can generate new data points and new features, while others manage to reduce the number of data points without information loss (aka intelligent sampling) or summarize the same information in a smaller number of features through the use of usually non-linear combinations of the original features (aka feature fusion). In all these cases, there isn’t any new information generated and there isn’t any significant information loss. What’s more, if you can effectively replace the original dataset with synthetic data, without losing any information then the claim that information is basically the original data doesn’t hold any water. In other words, information exists with or without the data at hand, since the same information can be expressed oftentimes more eloquently with a more succinct set of data points or features. Much like the essence of an ice cube is not the exact molecules of the water in it, but the fact that it consists of water and has a certain shape, dictated by the ice cube tray mold.

From all this, it follows that what we need is an information-rich dataset, i.e. a dataset that contains useful information without excessive data points or excessive features. Of course, it’s not always easy to perform the transformations required to accomplish this, but it is feasible and most modern A.I. systems are proof of that. Whether, however, this black box approach is the most effective way to accomplish this information distillation is something that needs to be investigated. In my view, looking into this sort of matters and having this perspective is far more important than all the technical know-how about the latest and greatest machine learning system, know-how that is oftentimes superficial when not accompanied by the data science mindset. The latter is something super important which however cannot be described in a simple blog article. I’ve written a book trying to explain it and even that may not have done it justice.

Anyway, pondering about these things may seem a bit philosophical, but if this pondering is transformed into concrete and actionable insights that can help improve existing data science methods or spawn new ones, then it’s probably more than just theoretical. Perhaps it’s this pondering that help keeps data science fresh in our minds, preventing it from becoming a mechanical process void of any life and inspiration. After all, just because many people have forgotten about what lured them to data science, it doesn’t mean that this is the only course of action. Someone can practice data science and still be enthusiastic about it while maintaining a sense of creative curiosity about the subject. It’s all a matter of perspective...

Short answer: Nope! Longer answer: clustering can be a simple deterministic problem, given that you figure out the optimal centroids to start with. But isn’t the latter the solution of a stochastic process though? Again, nope. You can meander around the feature space like a gambler, hoping to find some points that can yield a good solution, or you can tackle the whole problem scientifically. To do that, however, you have to forget everything you know about clustering and even basic statistics, since the latter are inherently limited and frankly, somewhat irrelevant to proper clustering.

Finding the optimal clusters is a two-fold problem: 1. you need to figure out which solutions make sense for the data (i.e. a good value for K), and 2. figure out these solutions in a methodical and robust manner. The former has been resolved as a problem and it’s fairly trivial. Vincent Granville talked about it in his blog, many years ago and since he is better at explaining things than I am, I’m not going to bother with that part at all. My solution to it is a bit different but it’s still heuristics-based. The 2nd part of the problem is also the more challenging one since it’s been something many people have been pursuing a while now, without much success (unless you count the super slow method of DBSCAN, with more parameters than letters in its name, as a viable solution).

To find the optimal centroids, you need to take into account two things, the density of each centroid and the distances of each centroid to the other ones. Then you need to combine the two in a single metric, with you need to maximize. Each one of these problems seems fairly trivial, but something that many people don’t realize is that in practice, it’s very very hard, especially if you have multi-dimensional data (where conventional distance metrics fail) and lots of it (making the density calculations a major pain). Fortunately, I found a solution to both of these problems using 1. a new kind of distance metric, that yields a higher U value (this is the heuristic used to evaluate distance metrics in higher dimensional space), though with an inevitable compromise, and 2. a far more efficient way of calculating densities. The aforementioned compromise is that this metric cannot guarantee that the triangular inequality holds, but then again, this is not something you need for clustering anyway. As long as the clustering algo converges, you are fine.

Preliminary results of this new clustering method show that it’s fairly quick (even though it searches through various values of K to find the optimum one) and computationally light. What’s more, it is designed to be fairly scalable, something that I’ll be experimenting with in the weeks to come. The reason for the scalability is that it doesn’t calculate the density of each data point, but of certain regions of the dataset only. Finding these regions is the hardest part, but you only need to do that once, before you start playing around with K values.

Anyway, I’d love to go into detail about the method but the math I use is different to anything you’ve seen and beyond what is considered canon. Then again, some problems need new math to be solved and perhaps clustering is one of them. Whatever the case, this is just one of the numerous applications of this new framework of data analysis, which I call AAF (alternative analytics framework), a project I’ve been working on for more than 10 years now. More on that in the coming months.