One of the most appealing data visualisation charts are maps. I love maps as they combine an incredible information density with intuitive readability. Also I feel that most people prefer maps over other visualisations. (Is there research on this?) So... [Read more...]

Digital transformation or digital business transformation is apparently currently one of the hot topics in the German business world. What puzzles me slightly, is why just now? The digitization trend has been around for ~20 years. Established buisness ... [Read more...]

Youtube is one of the channels the candidates for the US election use extensively to promote themself. Using the public Youtube API and the R package tuber it is pretty straightforward to create a snapshop of the online discussion and sentiment. First... [Read more...]

Once in a while I use AirBnB. There are a couple of features that I (intuitively) use to judge if an apartment is save to book; ratings, images of the flat and the user avatar. Apparently, these avatars play an important part in the overall service and usage of AirBnB. ... [Read more...]

I just started reading Alvin Roth’s book “Who gets What - And why?” and it already got me thinking. The book discusses the principles of markets and market design using various examples. One starting point is the transition of markets into being commodity markets. Simplified; in a commodity market ... [Read more...]

With the Euro’16 coming up in 2 weeks, I thought it would be great to look up the odds for each team. Using a small R-Script, I got the data from this site. As previously discussed, I cleaned the data (calculate the probability from the odds and then normalize the probability ... [Read more...]

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A while ago, I wrote about soccer odds in Germany. Specifically I wrote about the odds of relegation for two local teams; SV Darmstadt and Eintracht Frankfurt. As the season progressed in quite a negative sense, the question is still relevant. Let’s have a quick look at the current ... [Read more...]

Image recognition and object detection has been around for some years. However, usage and adoption was limited due to quality and ease of development. With the release of Microsoft’s Project Oxford, and Google’s Vision API, the accessibility and applicability has massively improved. Both APIs use REST API access ... [Read more...]

I previously did a short review on Microsoft’s image recognition and face detection API. A couple of weeks ago Google announced their vision API providing some similar features. Even though there is no R package or code to dive into this API and their API documentation is rather sparse, ... [Read more...]

Gathering data from the web is one of the key tasks in order to generate easy data-driven insights into various topics. Thanks to the fantastic Rvest R package web scraping is pretty straight forward. It basically works like this; go to a website, find the right items using the selector ... [Read more...]

In the last two posts 1, 2, I tried to discuss how measurement and false metrics drive optimization towards low hanging fruits and in the end degrade ad effectiveness. I would like to follow up with a short example of how the issue extends into the paid search (e.g. Google Adwords) ... [Read more...]

In the last post, I discussed how the current digital measurement approach is biased towards targeted ad buying. The key reason is that ad effectiveness is calculated on a cost per order/conversion basis. As particular user segments -which are addressed with digital targeting- have a high base purchase probability, ... [Read more...]

One of the key trends in the advertising industry is (digital) data-driven marketing. The whole thing starts with massive, passive data collection. No matter which website we visit or which app we use: We leave a digital footprint. These footprints are compiled for individual users and form so-called user profiles. ... [Read more...]

In the face of upcoming elections in the US and in Germany, polling is big news. One thing that strikes me as enormously missing in the debate is how inaccurate a single poll is. Moreover, one never reads about the uncertainty around a single poll. What is the range of ... [Read more...]

In a previous post, I expressed the feeling that artificial intelligence, data science and big data are currently “hot” in the news. One of my favorite news outlet (“Die Zeit”) has an open data policy in a sense that they have a public API. I thought it would be worth ... [Read more...]

An essential part of the typical office talk in Germany is about soccer and the Bundesliga. One of the current key questions is; which team will be relegated. The two local teams (SV Darmstadt and Eintracht Frankfurt) are (hot) candidates. While I love the banter, let’s be data-driven and ... [Read more...]

Image recognition and face detection has been around for some years. However, usage and adoption was limited due to quality and ease of development. With the release of Microsoft’s Project Oxford, the accessibility to such tools has massively improved. Their simple to use REST API provides an excellent opportunity ... [Read more...]

Writing my first post about the German data scientist job market, I was surprised to find such a low number of open positions. The scripts are easy to extend to a cross-country comparison. To simplify the analysis, this time I focused on the Indeed website only. As a baseline, I ... [Read more...]