Samples of Thoughts

Working with real-world data presents many challenges that sanitized text book data doesn’t have. One of them is how to handle outlier. Outliers are defined as points that differ significantly from other data points and they are especially common in data obtained through manual input processes. For example, on an online listing site, someone might accidentally pressed the zero-key a bit too often and suddenly the small rental flat is as expensive as a palace. »

In the last two years, I pretty much only went to very technical conferences, such as the PyData Berlin, the PyCon or the SatRday. They’re all great conferences, organized by awesome people and I will definitely go again but this fall I decided to try out a new conference and check out the Predictive Analytics World in Berlin. First, because it’s always good to try out new things and also because in the last months I was wondering a lot how data teams can be made more useful, somehow more aligned with the business challenges, which frankly isn’t talked much in Python talks about how to deploy machine learning models. »

In my data team at work, we’ve been using Docker for a while now. At least, the engineers in our team have been using it, we data scientists have been very reluctant to pick it up so far. Why bother with a new tool (that seems complicated) when you don’t see the reason, right? Until I was about to hold my Houseprice Talk again and wanted to make some small changes to my xaringan slides and nothing worked. »

The European Election is coming up and for the first time, I have the impression this election is actually talked about and might have an impact. I don’t remember people caring that much about European Elections in the years before, but this, of course, could also just be because I got more interested in European politics. Unfortunately, European politics are complex and this is also mirrored in the quantity of parties that are up for vote in Germany. »

Berlin is a great city that used to have the reputation of affordable rents. While for sure other cities are still much more expensive, the rents in Berlin have risen considerably. Or so says everyone of my friends and my colleagues and so does it feel looking at renting listings. I decided to have a look myself at the data to find out if there’s still a secret neighborhood in Berlin resisting the raising prices and who knows, maybe the data can even tell us if the neighborhood Wedding is indeed “coming”. »