What is this project about? Airbnb has allowed for much innovation in the hospitality industry, in some ways, disrupting traditional models and allowing smaller players to more easily enter the market by simplifying some of the business aspects. The data that Airbnb has made available can shed light on many aspects of the hospitality market that would be useful  for potential investors and entrepreneurs to make informed investment decisions. Some of the data available and used in this project is listings, coordinate location, neighbourhood, borough, price per night, number of reviews, a ..read more

(photo source: Uber's website) Shiny App Github Repository Uber and its Problem Uber is a very popular alternative to traditional taxi companies. With a few taps on a phone screen, drivers easily connect with riders. A type of trip for which car services are often needed is the trip to or from airports. People usually do not leave their own cars at airports, so they rely on car services for transportation. Due to the great demand, Uber can potentially gain a lot of revenue from rides to and from airports.  The issue is that this potential revenue is not actualized. Uber has a problem tha ..read more

I come from a Building Design Industry, the first 5 years of my career I was a Structural Engineer and designed stations and tunnels for Subway in Moscow. After that, I got really interested in new building design technology based on creating virtual copies of future buildings and using these models to store/aggregate all project data. This Technology is called Building Information Modeling (BIM). The range of problems engineers, architects, developers, construction companies are facing is very wide, hence there is a huge amount of different software that serves as the tools for BIM. And one ..read more

Introduction If I were to hand you two diamonds-- one created in a lab, one mined from the earth-- would you be able to distinguish one from the other? Would the type of diamond have any impact on your engagement? Lab diamonds are man-made, created by mimicking the extreme heat and pressure necessary to create diamonds. They are identical to a mined diamond in every way, down to its chemical structure. Lab diamonds have a more attractive price point, and buyers can feel guilt-free about avoiding the need to contribute to the humanitarian and environmental concerns associated with the diamond m ..read more

Introduction For many of us in the Data Science Boot Camp at the New York City Data Science Academy, the end goal is to acquire a position as a Data Scientist. To do so, many of us will scan the job boards like Indeed.com, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor. I thought that there is no better use of the skills I acquired at the boot camp than to automate my search and glean insights from as many posts as I could get acquire through web scraping Indeed.com. Why Indeed? Indeed.com is a popular web site used by job seekers and job posters to connect with each other. Of all the job boards, Indeed.com has the ..read more

Prescription drug costs in the United States have gone from $121 billion in 2000 to almost $360 billion in 2020.  An average American spends $1,200 per person per year on prescription drugs, the highest in the world.  The high cost is not the result of a more than average consumption but the high prices of prescription drug in the United States. For those with insurance, this burden can be lightened, but for the 10.3% of Americans who do not have insurance, this out of pocket outlay can be a huge burden.  Prescription drug discount coupons are one way to curb out of pocket pres ..read more

Acting as real-estate advisors, the central objective of the machine learning project was to provide insights for investors and home renovators on how to improve profits in the real-estate market in Ames, Iowa. To that end, a descriptive multiple linear regression model was built to analyze house features with respect to the sale price to understand how certain features influence the overall price. The Ames housing dataset contains entries on approximately 2500 sold houses between the years 2006 and 2010. The dataset contains over 80 features, detailing information on house characteristics su ..read more

Overview of Project Using Python's Scrapy package, the goal of this project was to conduct an exploratory data analysis of on residential real estate listings in Manhattan. This analysis aims to answer three questions regarding the borough's real-estate listings: What are some of the general trends in real-estate listings in Manhattan? What factors can affect the price of a Manhattan listing? How affordable and financially feasible is purchasing resdiential real-estate for the average New Yorker? The data for this project was scrapped from Realtor.com and consists of 1663 individual listings ..read more

An analysis on how the top 100 movies from Metacritic and IMDb compare to one another and what that reveals about what factors a fan evaluates when rating a movie versus a critic.  When you are looking for a movie to watch, I bet you do a little diligence. I know this because if you're reading this blog post you're interested in or involved in Data Science or the NYCDSA, and that means you use data to make everyday decisions. Many consumers use Yelp to find a new favorite dining spot or prowl through reviews to find the highest quality product on Amazon, but you take it to the next level ..read more

Shoes are an important component of our outfit and may say a lot about the wearer’s personality, it’s interesting that there are scientific studies [1] to support this hypothesis that people can be judged by their shoes! The global footwear market is a multi-billion U.S. dollar industry. The United States has the largest footwear market in the world, amounting to approximately 20.9 billion U.S. dollars in revenue in online shoe sales with 11.3% of annual growth between 2015 and 2020 [2]. Zappos.com is one of the most popular online shoe retailer because it provides excellent al ..read more