Publications by Laurens Geffert
Exploring Sales Data
A big part of the interview process for many data science positions is a data science task or assignment. Companies usually choose a data set that is typical for them, while only in rare cases a sample of their actual production data. Here, I am exploring such a data set, sent out by a leading UK retailer. The task Your task is to read all data ...
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Editable Plots from R to PowerPoint
In this post I am giving a quick overview of how to create editable plots in PowerPoint from R. These plots are comprised of simple vector-based shapes and thus allow you to change labels, colours, or text position in seconds. Your project managers will love it! Motivation R allows us to create great visualisations, but in most data science set...
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Airdrop delivery with A* pathfinding
This post is an event report and a quick walk through to a submission that I developed with a group of participants at an Alibaba / Met Office UK hackathon. We are using the A* algorithm with a couple of tweaks to route cargo balloons from London to a number of cities in the UK. It’s the year 2050. The invention of anti-gravity engines has led...
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Nesting Birds and Models in R Dataframes
R Dataframes in the tidyverse are more than just simple tables these days. They can store complex information in list columns, and this becomes an immensely powerful framework when we use it to apply methods to different sets of data in parallel. In this article I illustrate this approach using data for a rare UK bird species to investigate if it...
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Building Our Own Open Source Supercomputer with R and AWS
How to build a scaleable computing cluster on AWS and run hundreds or thousands of models in a short amount of time. We will completely rely on R and open source R packages. This is post 1 out of 2. Introduction An ever-increasing number of businesses is moving to the cloud and using platforms such as Amazon Web Services(AWS) for their data infr...
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How to Summarize your Travel History in under 5 Minutes
How to use your location history to compile a breakdown of all your international travel. Fast, simple, and valuable for immigration purposes or visa applications. We will use the Google Maps takeout feature and a small Python script Introduction When applying for my US visa, one of the questions that USCIS had for me was a breakdown of all my i...
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