Articles by tlfvincent

The biggest liars in US politics

September 25, 2016 | tlfvincent

Anyone that follows US politics will be aware of the tremendous changes and volatility that has struck the US political landscape in the past year. In this post, I leverage third-party data to surface who are the most frequent liars, and show how to build a containerized Shiny app to ... [Read more...]

Comparing the contribution of NBA draft picks

January 25, 2015 | tlfvincent

When it comes to the NBA draft, experts tend to argue about a number of things: at which position will a player be selected? what is the best draft class ever? etc… Luckily, the wealth of data made available by the great people of http://www.basketball-reference.com/draft/ make ...
[Read more...]

Competitive balance and home court advantage in the NBA

July 6, 2014 | tlfvincent

Two years ago, the entire NBA season went into lockout because of mostly financial reasons. However, one central point was also about keeping a competitive balance within the NBA, so that large and small-market teams alike would have a chance to compete for a championship. THis brings us to the ...
[Read more...]

The luckiest team in the NBA

June 8, 2014 | tlfvincent

While the NBA finals are in full swing and the two best teams are battling it out for the ultimate prize, another 28 are now in summer vacation. In order to achieve their goal of still playing this time next year, teams often look to improve their roster through trades, player ... [Read more...]

On the carbon footprint of the NBA

May 11, 2014 | tlfvincent

It’s no secret that I enjoy basketball, but I’ve often wondered about the carbon footprint that can be caused by 30 teams each playing an 82-game season. Ultimately, that’s 2460 air flights across the whole of the USA, each carrying 30+ individuals. For these reasons, I decided to investigate the ... [Read more...]

On the trade history and dynamics of NBA teams

April 28, 2014 | tlfvincent

While good draft picks and deft management can help you win championships, there is no doubt that NBA teams can massively gain, or lose, by trading players with one another. Here, I played around with some publicly available data given at basketball-reference.com, and had a look at the numbers ... [Read more...]

And the most loyal fans in the NBA are…

April 11, 2014 | tlfvincent

NBA basketball is the one the sports I enjoy watching the most. As I was ordering my (undisclosed amount)th beer while watching a game during after-work hours, it occurred to me how often I had seen sparsely populated arenas during games, with large areas of seats going unoccupied. This ... [Read more...]

On the rise of Big Data and Data Science

April 5, 2014 | tlfvincent

This post is going to differ slightly from the data-orientated material that I usually publish. I was recently playing around with the Google trends API and came across some very interesting…well….trends. There has definitely been a huge amount of publicity surrounding “Big Data”, maybe even too much. For ... [Read more...]

President Approval Ratings from Roosevelt to Obama

March 29, 2014 | tlfvincent

I have been watching the awesome Netflix show “House of Cards” and been fascinated by the devious schemes that Underwood is constantly plotting. The show often mentions approval ratings and it got me to wondering what Obama’s ratings currently were, and all other past US president  for that matter. ... [Read more...]

Dynamic arrays in R, Python and Julia

March 18, 2014 | tlfvincent

Although I have a heavy background in statistics (and therefore am primarily an R user), I find that my overall knowledge in computer science is generally lacking. Therefore, I have recently delved deeper into learning about data structures, their associated ADT’s and how they can be implemented. At the ... [Read more...]

Using APIs in Python: a quick example

March 4, 2014 | tlfvincent

Python has an extremely intuitive and straightforward way of dealing with APIs, and makes it simple for people like you or me to access and retrieve information from databases. Before I quickly describe how to use APIs in Python, maybe we should begin with: What is an API? API (Application ... [Read more...]

New York crime rates

February 23, 2014 | tlfvincent

While browsing through different sites, I randomly cam across the ominous-sounding disaster center website. There is a fair amount of data that could be analyzed there, but my attention was caught by an entry stating that they had just updated the “1965 to 2012 State Crime Pages”. From there, I chose the ... [Read more...]

World tourism and country expenditure

February 13, 2014 | tlfvincent

I’ve recently come across the https://www.undata-api.org/ website, which makes available all the great data that has been gathered by the UN. There’s literally a thousand different datasets one could analyze, and I intend on doing just that, but for some reason I opted to look ... [Read more...]

Restaurant Inspection Results

February 3, 2014 | tlfvincent

Living in NYC is not good for one’s cooking skills. There are just too many mouth-watering options out there that always convince me to eat out rather that stay in line for two hours at Trader Joe’s. Also, this means that my fridge always has room for life ... [Read more...]

Mapping the taste profile of Scottish whishkeys

January 26, 2014 | tlfvincent

Recently, I came across this interesting blog post http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2013/12/k-means-clustering-86-single-malt-scotch-whiskies.html by the Revolutions blog poster Luba Gloukhov. This post initially caught my attention because of the originality of the dataset: 86 scottish whiskeys marked on a scale of 0-4 in 12 different taste profile (source data is ... [Read more...]
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