About
My name is Giora Simchoni. I’m a Data Scientist at vFunction, before that IBM, before that ebay, before that MSc. Statistics at TAU. I live in the north of Israel in a small village with my partner and...
View ArticleAnne Frank's Diary: A Sentiment Analysis
A while ago I read through Social Media Mining with R and was fascinated by the subject of Sentiment Analysis. I decided to apply more or less the same analysis to a text which was dear to my heart:...
View ArticleYou Better (Net)Work!
RuPaul’s Drag Race happens to be my second best reality TV show. Can you guess the first? Oh, I’m sure I’ll get to that eventually. Anyway. For 9 seasons (not including two All Stars seasons) I have...
View ArticleFederer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray, Love.
What do people mean when they say “The Big Four”? In tennis, there is a single answer: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. These 4 players have dominated the world of men’s...
View ArticleDon't Drink and Gamble
Once upon a time I took a job as a Gaming Analyst and Mathematician at a big Online Gambling company. What can I say. The term “Data Science” did not exist, and this was the highest paying job around....
View ArticleData Porn!
Recently I’ve stumbled upon this treasure of data, called sexualitics.org. I love exploring bizarre datasets and it doesn’t get more bizarre than (brace yourselves) ~786 thousand (!) tagged porn video...
View ArticleBillboard Bananas
I was looking for a “mellow” project to make, when I came across this post by Michael Kling, playing in Python with the Billboard Hot 100 charts since 1940, scraped from the Ultimate Music Database...
View ArticleThe Sounds of Probability
I’ve always wanted to play with Sonification: “… the use of non-speech audio to convey information or perceptualize data.” (Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge) Don’t get me wrong, I am thrilled...
View ArticleThe One With Friends
I’ve recently stumbbled upon this really cool text analysis of Seinfeld scripts, by Michael Groesbeck. It occurred to me though that with recent advancements in text mining and visualization tools...
View ArticleDeep South Springfield
Recently RStudio (a.k.a my dream job) released a wrapper around keras with TensorFlow backend. Well, I just had to take this baby for a spin. But what to train my first Deep Learning network in R on?...
View ArticleIt Gets Better (The yrbss Package)
It’s Pride Month! So I thought, maybe I should perform some cool analyses of data concerning the Gay community. From one google result to another I reached the American “Centers for Disease Control and...
View ArticleMC RNN
I have been struggling with the understanding of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) for a while. I find that explaining a topic to other people really helps in nailing...
View ArticleAuto Emojis
I hate Emojis. I’m sorry, I do. So I decided to make my own. Automatically. Strike a POS! The idea is to take a given piece of text, and replace some words automatically with custom-made emojis, which...
View ArticleRead My Face
Recently I’ve seen some interesting posts showing how to make ASCII art in R (see here and here). Why limit ourselves to ASCII, I thought. Lincoln’s portrait could be drawn with the Gettysberg Address...
View ArticlePlaymate of the Month - From Marylin To Ashley
I like working with weird and unexpected datasets. And when they don’t come to me - I go get them myself. This week I scraped Wikipedia for the details of every single Playboy’s Playmate of the Month...
View ArticleData Paintings (The kandinsky Package)
Recently I have moaned about not really knowing what I was doing with the grid package (see here and here). I’m happy to say, not only did I take the time to better understand the grid package, I also...
View ArticleLambada! (The mocap Package)
In my continuing mission to explore strange new datasets, I’ve come across a little article analyzing data which came from… Samba dancing! The way the researchers turned Samba dancing into data was by...
View ArticleYou're in a room (The CastleOfR Package)
It has always been a dream of mine to create a text-based game (a.k.a interactive fiction or text adventure). Text-based games were common in the 1980s when I was a kid, and personal computers were...
View ArticleWhere My Girls At?
As a father of three girls, Facebook decided recently to show me this video, titled “If you have a daughter, you need to see this”: It shows a mother and daughter gradually removing books from a...
View ArticleSign of the Times
For my very first course in Statistics during my undergrad years, we had to make “a project”, defined as “go out there, gather some data, summarize them and perform proper statistics on them”. My...
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