Now that we have our voting history data in the form of a Pandas data frame, we can now move on to the next step – quantifying relationships in Survivor. [This is the second article in my Survivor Alliance Analysis series. The first article focuses on scraping the Survivor wiki for voting history data. The third article focuses on visualizing the network of relationships. The fourth article focuses on comparing the alliance networks of different seasons.]   An Introduction There have been numerous studies that analyze the TV show Survivor. One analyzed the portrayal of women in the show, whil ..read more

Follow my blog with Bloglovin 13 Reasons Why Season 2 hasn’t been confirmed yet, but we have great reason to speculate. There are still a lot of loose ends that were not resolved in the finale. The showrunners have a lot of material they can work on. The only problem I see with a second season is the title of the show – the 13 reasons have already been exposed. Perhaps they can shift the focus away from Hannah and change the title of the show? Let me list six probable storylines for season 2. Alex’s suicide attempt The biggest cliffhanger in last season’s finale is whether Alex survived his s ..read more

Text analytics is one of the most interesting applications of computing. It involves taking raw text, converting it into a set of numerical features, and applying a natural language processing (NLP) or machine learning (ML) algorithm on it to derive some insight. Let’s focus on the second step. How do we actually transform raw text into numerical features? In this post, I will explore two ways this can be done: the Bag-of-words model and tf-idf. Bag-of-words Model You can think of the bag-of-words (BoW) model as a machine which takes as input a set of documents and outputs a table containing ..read more

We can construct networks literally out of anything – out of the people we encounter at school or work, out of the wireless signals which allow us to connect the internet, out of social media. Heck, we can even construct a network out of the circle of life – the food web. By representing phenomena as networks, we can study the mathematical properties of their structure. In this post, I’ll introduce four network metrics – degree, closeness, betweenness, and clustering – which quantify relationships in networks. I’ll also give some intuition on how they’re calculated and what they actually repre ..read more

I have always wanted to be a data scientist, the sexiest job of the 21st century. The problem is, I wasn’t a data science major, so the stuff I learned in school weren’t really relevant to the field. Luckily, massively open online courses (MOOCs) were there so I could learn things on my own. I list here three amazing data science online courses that I’ve taken. Online Course 1: Applied Data Science with Python This offering from the University of Michigan is a five-course specialization on the data science pipeline. The first two courses deal with data manipulation and plotting, focusing on ..read more

Since 2013, there’s been an outer-space movie renaissance happening. Is this boom due to the advancement of CGI and special effects? In other words, are movies set in outer space being released at a greater rate because the technology to make them just recently became available? In this post, let me enumerate some good and bad aspects of the big-budget outer space movies released since 2013 and provide you a ranking. 1. Gravity (2013) Tomatometer Score: 96% Starring: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney Directed by: Alfonso Cuaron Biomedical engineer Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is in her first ..read more

Reality TV shows are the guilty pleasure of many (including me!). The thing about these shows is that we can relate to the cast since they’re average joes like me and you. For every famous reality show, like Survivor or Amazing Race, there is an underrated show which didn’t catch the ratings. Low ratings lead to cancellation, and so these shows are eventually forgotten. However, that does not necessarily mean that they are of awful quality. Here are three underrated reality TV shows – probably ahead of their time – that deserve an audience. 1. King of the Nerds King of the Nerds, as is stan ..read more

There have been a lot of great indie movies released in the past two years. To help you out, I curated a list of five movies that I really enjoyed. These five movies didn’t attain commercial success, but commercial success is not always an indicator of quality. If you give these movies a chance, I’m sure you won’t regret it. These are my top five indie movies from the past two years, in chronological order.  1. The Lobster Release Date: October 2015 The Lobster is set in an absurd world with a premise that single people are sent to a hotel in order to find a suitable match in a span of 45 ..read more

Survivor is my favorite reality competition show of all time. It’s been on air for almost 17 years, and it’s not hard to see why. It has everything that you would want from a TV show – drama, twists, challenges. The show has gained a loyal following over the years, and it’s unlikely for the show to end its run anytime soon. Gameplay-wise, the main focus of the show is the concept of alliances. At its core, Survivor is a power struggle among several competing alliances. It’s very hard, if not impossible, to make it far in the game without being part of one. This is the something that’s very int ..read more

VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary for sEntiment Reasoning) is a model used for sentiment analysis that is sensitive to both polarity (positive/negative) and intensity (strength) of emotion. Introduced in 2014, VADER sentiment analysis uses a human-centric approach, combining qualitative analysis and empirical validation by using human raters and the wisdom of the crowd. In this post, I’ll discuss how VADER calculates the valence score of an input text. It combines a dictionary, which maps lexical features to emotion intensity, and five simple heuristics, which encode how contextual elements incr ..read more