Presentations

I gave this talk twice, both at PyData DC on October 24, 2016 and at PyData Carolinas on September 15, 2016. Both videos are below if you feel like figuring out which presentation was better! PyData DC PyData Carolinas Slides Description Network analyses are powerful methods for both visual analytics and machine learning but can suffer as their complexity increases. By embedding time as a structural element rather than a property, we will explore how time series and interactive analysis can be improved on Graph structures. Primarily we will look at decomposition in NLP-extracted concept graphs using NetworkX and Graph Tool. ...

Description We talk to Benjamin Bengfort about his Data Day Seattle talks, District Data Labs, and Ben’s popular O’Reilly books.

Description Machine learning is the hacker art of describing the features of instances that we want to make predictions about, then fitting the data that describes those instances to a model form. Applied machine learning has come a long way from it’s beginnings in academia, and with tools like Scikit-Learn, it’s easier than ever to generate operational models for a wide variety of applications. Thanks to the ease and variety of the tools in Scikit-Learn, the primary job of the data scientist is model selection. Model selection involves performing feature engineering, hyperparameter tuning, and algorithm selection. These dimensions of machine learning often lead computer scientists towards automatic model selection via optimization (maximization) of a model’s evaluation metric. However, the search space is large, and grid search approaches to machine learning can easily lead to failure and frustration. Human intuition is still essential to machine learning, and visual analysis in concert with automatic methods can allow data scientists to steer model selection towards better fitted models, faster. In this talk, we will discuss interactive visual methods for better understanding, steering, and tuning machine learning models. ...

Description Data products derive their value from data and generate new data in return; as a result, machine learning techniques must be applied to their architecture and their development. Machine learning fits models to make predictions on unknown inputs and must be generalizable and adaptable. As such, fitted models cannot exist in isolation; they must be operationalized and user facing so that applications can benefit from the new data, respond to it, and feed it back in to the data product. Data product architectures are therefore life cycles and understanding the data product life cycle will enable architects to develop robust, failure free workflows and applications. In this talk we will discuss the data product life cycle, explore how to engage a model build, evaluation, and selection phase with an operation and interaction phase. Following the lambda architecture, we will investigate wrapping a central computational store for speed and querying, as well as incorporating a discussion of monitoring, management, and data exploration for hypothesis driven development. From web applications to big data appliances; this architecture serves as a blueprint for handling data services of all sizes! ...

Natural Language Processing with NLTK and Gensim Description Natural Language Processing (NLP) is often taught at the academic level from the perspective of computational linguists. However, as data scientists, we have a richer view of the natural language world - unstructured data that by its very nature has latent information that is important to humans. NLP practitioners have benefited from machine learning techniques to unlock meaning from large corpora, and in this class we’ll explore how to do that particularly with Python, Gensim, and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). ...

Natural Language Processing and Hadoop Description Benjamin Bengfort and Sean Murphy discuss how NLP can be integrated with Hadoop to gain insights in big data.

Description Presentation by the CTO of Unbound Concepts, Benjamin Bengfort, at the Columbia TechBreakfast 2012.