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Analytics and Data Science News for the Week of December 22; Updates from Alteryx, Databricks, Dataiku & More – Solutions Review

Solutions Review Executive Editor Tim King curated this list of notable analytics and data science news for the week of December 22, 2023.

Keeping tabs on all the most relevant analytics and data science news can be a time-consuming task. As a result, our editorial team aims to provide a summary of the top headlines from the last week, in this space. Solutions Review editors will curate vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy analytics and data science news items.

Upon completion of the transaction, Alteryx will become a privately held company. The transaction, which was approved and recommended by an independent Special Committee of Alteryxs Board of Directors and then approved by Alteryxs Board of Directors, is expected to close in the first half of 2024.

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These investments include simple logins from Power BI and Tableau, simplified single sign-on setup via unified login, OAuth authorization, and running jobs using the identity of a service principal as a security best practice.

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The survey supports this notion: Platforms offersafer implementation and better scalability, providing a collaborative set of capabilities to reduce implementation hurdles as organizations adopt and accelerate Generative AI applications.

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As the App owner you can nowpresentusers who are interested in having access toower BIcontentcustommessagesthatexplain or link to how a user can get access to the Power BIApp. You can now change the default access request behavior for a Power BI App by going to the Power BI apps settings and configuring theAccess requestsoptions as desired.

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This timely acquisition marks an advancement in simplifying data handling for businesses, focusing on a data product-oriented approach for better data quality and governance. Integrating Mozaic into Qliks portfolio brings a transformative approach to managing data as a product.

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Watch this space each week as our editors will share upcoming events, new thought leadership, and the best resources from Insight Jam, Solutions Reviews enterprise tech community for business software pros. The goal? To help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend through expert advice, best practices, trends and predictions, and vendor-neutral software evaluation tools.

With the next Solutions Spotlight event, the team at Solutions Review has partnered with leading reliability vendor Monte Carlo to provide viewers with a unique webinar called Driving Data Warehouse Cost Optimization and Performance. Hear from our panel of experts on best practices for optimizing Snowflake query performance with cost governance; native Snowflake features such as cost and workload optimization, and Monte Carlos new Performance Dashboard for query optimization across your Snowflake environment.

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Solutions Review hosted its biggest Insight Jam LIVE ever, with 18 hours of expert panels featuring more than 100 thought leaders, sponsored by Satori and Monte Carlo. Also, part of this largest-ever Insight Jam LIVE was a call for 2024 enterprise tech & AI predictions, and wow, did the community oblige!

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For our 5th annual Insight Jam LIVE! Solutions Review editors sourced this resource guide of analytics and data science predictions for 2024 from Insight Jam, its new community of enterprise tech experts.

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For our 5th annual Insight Jam LIVE! Solutions Review editors sourced this resource guide of AI predictions for 2024 from Insight Jam, its new community of enterprise tech experts.

Read on for more.

For consideration in future analytics and data science news roundups, send your announcements to the editor: tking@solutionsreview.com.

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Analytics and Data Science News for the Week of December 22; Updates from Alteryx, Databricks, Dataiku & More - Solutions Review

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Hot Jobs in AI/Data Science for 2024 – Hot Jobs in AI/Data Science for 2024 – InformationWeek

Its not a surprise that AI and data science professionals remain in demand given the explosion of AI models on the market, and the rapid-fire advancements since. But just as companies are still struggling to figure out business use cases for LLMs, they also struggle to identify corresponding job roles. To make matters worse, there are additional obstacles popping up along the way.

Theres the acceleration of AI-adjacent talent wars: Its not just AI, says Babak Hodjat, CTO of AI at Cognizant Technology Solutions.

What types of job roles fall into the category of AI-adjacent talent?

At Persado, according to Frank Chen, the companys head of natural language processing, that list includes:

Research scientists who conduct cutting-edge research to develop new models and techniques for generative AI tasks.

Machine learning/NLP/data/software engineers who build and deploy GenAI models.

Data scientists and analysts who experiment and analyze model results.

Content specialists who create guidelines to control the generated content, collaborate with the AI development team to refine the generated content, evaluate the quality of generated content, and provide feedback to improve GenAI models.

Experienced UX/UI designers who ensure the designed AI interface aligns with user needs.

Related:Prompt Engineering: Passing Fad or the Future of Programming?

But job competition is also heating up elsewhere.

In 2024, well also see the war for cyber and software development talent grow more contentious as a result of major privacy concerns and savings-driven budget reallocations born from the generative AI boom, Hodjat says.

No doubt more job roles will emerge while others will soon fade away as AI matures, and companies become more adept at using it.

Data science and AI continue to be industries with strong growth projections, but there are a few jobs in particular that should be in demand for the foreseeable future, says Richard Gardner, CEO of Modulus, which touts a client list including NASA, NASDAQ, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Barclays, Siemens, Shell, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Cornell University, and the University of Chicago.

Some job titles are already familiar such as prompt engineers and AI content editors. But those roles do not have standard descriptions or pay scales. For example, job boards are filled with ads for AI content editors at a mere $20 to $40 an hour. These are typically posted by employers who think these jobs require simple skills and little effort. But that is blatantly untrue. Depending on the complexity of the subject matter, it can actually take humans longer and exert more effort to edit and fact-check GenAI outputs than it does to write the thing from scratch.

Related:Hire or Upskill? The Burning Question in an Age of Runaway AI

Prompt engineer job roles also see a wide swing in job descriptions and pay scales. Sometimes vague job descriptions and low pay offers are due to an employers lack of experience in working with AI or a general cluelessness of what use cases they have for AI. Other times, its the opposite. The employer knows exactly what technical and linguistic skills they need from this group of job candidates and the pay offered better reflects the level of complexity.

In any case, according to ZipRecruiter, as of Nov 29, 2023, the average annual pay for a Prompt Engineering in the United States is $62,977 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $30.28 an hour.

Eventually the job of prompt engineer will likely disappear as AI agents can already write their own prompts. But for now, most companies are looking to hire prompt engineers to get the most out of AI while also keeping token costs down.

As many would expect, the demand for large language model (LLM) engineers and natural language processing (NLP) engineers is on the rise.

Related:The IT Jobs AI Could Replace and the Ones It Could Create

The new and highly specialized role known as the LLM Engineer is primarily found within organizations that have reached an advanced stage in their AI journey, having conducted numerous experiments but now facing challenges in the operationalization of their AI models at scale, says Kjell Carlsson, head of data science strategy and evangelism at Domino Data Lab.

Glassdoor reports that as of November 2023, the estimated total pay for a LLM engineer is $164,029 per year in the United States area, with an average salary of $129,879 per year. The range of total pay is between $123k and $224k. ZipRecruiter pegs average total pay for this group at $142,663 per year, or $69 per hour.

NLP engineers are seeing an uptick in demand for AI and non-AI based projects but is itself continuing to evolve.

For example, Natural Language Processing Engineers, which essentially work to make applications that process human language, are currently in high demand for chatbots, but, over time, will continue to see demand for sentiment analyses and content recommendation systems, Gardner says.

Glassdoor reports the pay range for NLP engineers to be between $130k and $180k per year. Talent.com reports a wider pay spectrum of between $100k and $210k a year.

A range of other jobs are emerging, too. Topping this list is AI agent jobs and skills.

The agent view of AI [autonomous AI agents] will take on an increasingly significant role in AI-enablement projects, becoming a sought-after skill, Hodjat says. Various orchestration frameworks and platforms will vie to become the standard and software engineering will move towards adopting LLM-based agents into the fabric of software systems.

Other emerging job roles are harder to define and peg to a salary range.

Some of the most sought-after AI positions today include machine learning engineer, AI engineer, and AI architect, says Shmuel Fink, Chair Master of Science in data analytics, Touro University Graduate School of Technology. Nevertheless, several other AI roles are also gaining prominence, such as AI ethicist, AI product manager, AI researcher, computer vision engineer, robotics engineer, and AI safety engineer. Moreover, there are positions that require industry-specific expertise, like a healthcare AI engineer.

But back at the ranch, employees in any job role will become more valuable if they possess AI skills. As they gain those skills, some specialized job roles will evolve while others disappear. The one thing that is certain is that theres far more AI-driven and AI-adjacent change to come.

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Hot Jobs in AI/Data Science for 2024 - Hot Jobs in AI/Data Science for 2024 - InformationWeek

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Graduate Program Offers USDA Fellowship in Data Science – UConn Today – University of Connecticut

Students applying to the masters program in agricultural and resource economics (ARE) in UConns College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources who are interested in data science can also apply for a USDA National Needs Fellowship.

The USDA National Needs Fellowship in Data Science was established last year through a grant to the department to help address an unmet need for agricultural and resource economists with an expertise in data science.

The USDA feels there is a dire need for this type of skill across the U.S., says Farhed Shah, associate professor and director of graduate studies in ARE.

Anyone applying for the masters may indicate on their application that they would like to be considered for the USDA fellowship.

Its a great opportunity to recruit top students in a critical area of national need, Rigoberto Lopez, professor and member of the ARE graduate committee, says.

The funding supports students for both years of the masters program providing them with a tuition waver and a stipend of $18,500 per year. Applications are due January 15, 2024. The funding is limited to U.S. citizens or nationals.

UConn will recruit seven students in total over the course of three years.

UConns program is the only agricultural economics program in the country currently offering a specialization in data science.

Students have access to a unique program that will train them for the future in a national priority area, Lopez says.

ARE faculty have been involved in the development of data science programs at UConn since the beginning, with faculty, such as Nathan Fiala and Charles Towe, serving on the founding committee and teaching in the program.

We have always been an integral part of data science at the University of Connecticut since day one, Lopez says.

Shah says they evaluate applicants based on prior experience to data science or related fields such as math, statistics, and computer science, GRE math scores, and demonstrated motivation to pursue a career in data science.

In addition to the core courses all masters students take, fellows will also take data science electives within and outside of their home department. They will also complete a research-based capstone.

Our other masters students have the option of just doing a coursework-oriented masters or a research-oriented masters, Shah says. These folks dont have that option. They will have to do some research in which they will be expected to apply the tools theyve learned as part of the program.

This program will prepare students for data science careers in the public or private sector, or a PhD program.

The Department received another USDA National Needs award for watershed management in 2011. This program supported five students who have since gone on to work in high-level positions at organizations such as the Trust for Public Land and the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources.

UConns program currently supports two USDA fellows: Cam McClure 23 25 (CAHNR) and Lindsey Orr 23 25 (CAHNR).

McClure had been applying to data science masters programs, but with the USDA fellowship, the ARE program was the perfect fit.

It aligned incredibly well with what I wanted to do, McClure says. I had an interest in both data science and the environmental economics side of it. So, this was a fantastic way to align two interests that I had that I didnt fully realize I could do together.

As part of their fellowships, Orr and McClure are working with UConns Zwick Center for Food and Policy Research on various research projects.

McClure has been working on waste and trash initiatives in Connecticut and is starting a new project looking at estuary land along the Long Island Sound.

Orr is also working on waste research, investigating how giving grants to promote recycling could impact rates in communities.

I did originally get into this major because I was interested in environmental economics and sustainability, Orr says. So, theres a lot of different areas that appealed to me from food policy to energy to environmental preservation.

Students who are part of the fellowship have the opportunity to take courses outside the department in their areas of interest, such as the fundamentals of data science and research design and methods.

I thought it was really cool to develop these skills to use later on, but also for me to be someone who was not an engineering major and to get to sit in class and learn about managing databases, Orr says. I feel like thats a really unique opportunity. I feel like its going to allow me to get a lot closer to what I want to do and learn some really interesting things.

This work relates to CAHNRs Strategic Vision area focused on Ensuring a Vibrant and Sustainable Agricultural Industry and Food Supply.

Follow UConn CAHNR on social media

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QuickSort Algorithm: An Overview – Built In

Sorting is the process of organizing elements in a structured manner. QuickSort is one of the most popular sorting algorithms that uses nlogn comparisons to sort an array of n elements in a typical situation. QuickSort is based on the divide-and-conquer strategy.

QuickSort is a sorting algorithm that uses a divide-and-conquer strategy to sort an array. It does so by selecting a pivot element and then sorting values larger than it on one side and smaller to the other side, and then it repeats those steps until the array is sorted. It is useful for sorting big data sets.

Well take a look at the quicksort algorithm in this tutorial and see how it works.

QuickSort is a fast sorting algorithm that works by splitting a large array of data into smaller sub-arrays. This implies that each iteration splits the input into two components, sorts them and then recombines them. The technique is highly efficient for big data sets because its average and best-case complexity is O(n*logn).

QuickSort was created by Tony Hoare in 1961 and remains one of the most effective general-purpose sorting algorithms available today. It works by recursively sorting the sub-lists to either side of a given pivot and dynamically shifting elements inside the list around that pivot.

As a result, the quicksort method can be summarized in three steps:

More on Data ScienceBubbleSort Time Complexity and Algorithm Explained

Lets take a look at an example to get a better understanding of the quicksort algorithm. In this example, the array below contains unsorted values, which we will sort using quicksort.

The process starts by selecting one element known as the pivot from the list. This can be any element. A pivot can be:

For this example, well use the last element, 4, as our pivot.

Now, the goal here is to rearrange the list such that all the elements less than the pivot are to its left, and all the elements greater than the pivot are to the right of it. Remember:

Lets simplify the above example,

As elements 2, 1, and 3 are less than 4, they are on the pivots left side. Elements can be in any order: 1,2,3, or 3,1,2, or 2,3,1. The only requirement is that all of the elements must be less than the pivot. Similarly, on the right side, regardless of their sequence, all components should be greater than the pivot.

In other words, the algorithm searches for every value that is smaller than the pivot. Values smaller than pivot will be placed on the left, while values larger than pivot will be placed on the right. Once the values are rearranged, it will set the pivot in its sorted position.

Once we have partitioned the array, we can break this problem into two sub-problems. First, sort the segment of the array to the left of the pivot, and then sort the segment of the array to the right of the pivot.

Lets cover a few key advantages of using quicksort:

Despite being the fastest algorithm, quicksort has a few drawbacks. Lets look at some of the drawbacks of quicksort.

The subarrays are rearranged in a certain order using the partition method. You will find various ways to partition. Here, we will see one of the most used methods.

Lets look at quicksort programs written in JavaScript and Python programming languages. Wellstart by creating a function that allows you to swap two components.

Now, lets add a function that uses the final element (last value) as the pivot, moves all smaller items to the left of pivot, and all larger elements to the right of the pivot, and places the pivot in the appropriate location in the sorted array.

Next, lets add the main function that will partition and sort the elements.

Lets finish off by adding a function to print the array.

Here is the full code of quicksort implementation for JavaScript:

Now, lets look at quicksort programs written in Python.Well start by creating a function which is responsible for sorting the first and last elements of an array.

Next, well add the main function that implements quick_sort.

Lets finish off by adding a function to print the array.

Here is the full code of quicksort implementation in Python.

Lets look at the space and time complexity of quicksort in the best, average and worst case scenarios. In general, the time consumed by quicksort can be written as follows:

Here, T(k) and T(n-k-1)refer to two recursive calls, while the last term O(n) refers to the partitioning process. The number of items less than pivot is denoted by k.

When the partitioning algorithm always chooses the middle element or near the middle element as the pivot, the best case scenario happens. Quicksorts best-case time complexity is O (n*logn). The following is the best-case recurrence.

This occurs when the array elements are in a disordered sequence that isnt increasing or decreasing properly. QuickSorts average case time complexity is O(n*logn). The following is the average-case recurrence.

The worst-case situation is when the partitioning algorithm picks the largest or smallest element as the pivot element every time. The worst-case time complexity of quicksort is O (n2). The following is the worst-case recurrence.

The space complexity for quicksort is O(log n).

The sorting algorithm is used to find information, and since quicksort is the fastest, it is frequently used as a more efficient search approach.

QuickSort may have a few drawbacks, but it is the fastest and most efficient sorting algorithm available. QuickSort has an O (logn) space complexity, making it an excellent choice for situations where space is restricted.

Although the worst-case running time is always the same, quicksort is often faster than HeapSort (nlogn). QuickSort takes up less space than heap sort due to the fact that a heap is nearly a full binary tree with pointers overhead. So, when it comes to sorting arrays, quicksort is preferred.

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More on PythonHow to Implement Binary Search in Python

There might be a few drawbacks to quicksort, but it is the fastest sorting algorithm out there. QuickSort is an efficient algorithm that performs well in practice.

In this article, we learned what quicksort is, its benefits and drawbacks and how to implement it.

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QuickSort Algorithm: An Overview - Built In

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Crunching numbers isn’t enough; you also have to explain results – University of Colorado Boulder

CU Boulder researcher Eric Vance recently won the W.J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting, in recognition of his work to help statisticians and data scientists become better communicators

The skills of statistics and data science are broad and varied, requiring those who use them not only to ask the right questions and capture the right data, but to process and analyze it and then convey what they discovered.

Students of statistics and data science are taught methods and modeling, theyre taught to code and to troubleshoot, but how do we teach students in statistics and data science to become more effective collaborators? asks Eric Vance, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of applied mathematics.

The thing about modern statistics is that almost anybody can upload an Excel spreadsheet to a statistical software program, do some stuff and get answers. You can have people who understand data, who understand methods and the appropriate conditions to use those methods. But what we want is to grow the number of well-trained data scientists who understand that the context of data matters and who also have that drive to see their work put into action for the benefit of society and know how to collaborate to make that happen.

Eric Vance (center), a CU Boulder associate professor of applied mathematics, is a Fulbright fellow in Indonesia for the 2023-24 academic year. Hes working with colleagues at IPB University to develop a course in effective statistics and data science collaboration

For most of his career, Vance has recognized that its not enough to be good at statistics and data sciencestudents entering these fields must also learn communication and project-management skills to become effective collaborators. He has designed curricula and academic programs that promote this goal, work that recently was recognized with the American Statistical Associations W.J. Dixon Award for Excellence in Statistical Consulting.

The award recognizes individuals who have demonstrated excellence in statistical consulting or developed and contributed new methods, software or ways of thinking that improve statistical practice in general.

As the youngest winner by at least 15 years, Vance is in the middle rather than at the close of his career, which is good because theres still a lot I want to do to translate my framework for collaboration into different languages and cultures, and to build it up across disciplines.

Doing good with data

Since the beginning of Vances academic career, which started as director of the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis at Virginia Tech, I noticed that my students were really good in statistical methods, but only some of them were really good in the non-technical skills, the communication skills, he says.

Part of my job was also to teach statistical consulting, so I started to think about what are the key aspects that a student needs to know, that a student can learn to become an effective, collaborative statistician?

Good data scientists have a deep store of quantitative skills, he says, and many enter the field because they want to work with real data and pursue projects that help society and benefit humanity. Plus, in this hyper-plugged-in world, data are everywherepowerful data in huge datasets with the potential to have sweeping effects. The demand for people who can analyze data properly and leverage them appropriately is growing.

But what I noticed is kind of holding statisticians and scientists back is not technical skillsits not that they dont know the latest analysis techniquebut its that they dont have the communication skills, Vance says. That became my focus: What is it that a student or a data scientist needs to know to effectively unlock the technical skills to do the most good?

At CU Boulder, Vance established and directs the Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Statistical Analysis (LISA), housed in the Department of Applied Mathematics, to teach students to become effective interdisciplinary collaborators who can apply statistical analysis and data science to enable and accelerate research on campus and making data-driven business decisions and policy interventions in the community.

Vance explains that often statisticians and data scientists are not the ones collecting the data they analyze, so if we want to develop new methods, we need to have data, and who has data? Everybody else. Domain experts are everywhere around world, so statistics and data science should be collaborative disciplines, and students should learn to work with a chemist or a biologist or an English professor or an elected official to help them think about what kind of data they have, help them collect high-quality data and transform into policy and action.

More than just good with data

Vance and his colleagues have built LISA into the center of the global LISA 2020 Global Network of statics labs that aim to strengthen local capacity in statistical analysis and data science and to transform academic evidence into action for development.

You cant just be good with data anymore; you have to be able to communicate why it matters.

The LISA 2020 Global Network comprises 35 statistics labs in 10 countries, including Nigeria, Brazil and Pakistan. Vance is now a Fulbright fellow in Indonesia, where hes working with colleagues at IPB University to develop a course in effective statistics and data science collaboration and establish a new statistics and data science collaboration center.

Several years ago, Vance and research colleague Heather Smith developed the ASCCR frameworkwhich stands for attitude, structure, content, communication and relationshipto support this model of statistics and data science education that incorporates collaboration skills. Vances work in Indonesia is also exploring how to adapt ASCCR within different cultural contexts.

We want statistics and data science students around the world to have the skills to collaborate and communicate with domain experts, Vance says. Maybe its a researcher around campus, maybe a local policy maker, maybe a local businesspersonanybody who has data and wants to be able to do something with the data, make a decision based on the data or come to some conclusion.

We want students to become people who can talk with a domain expert to understand what the problem is, what the data are, how they were collected, the provenance of the data, and then figure out what that the domain expert actually wants to do with the data. That means understanding the workflow of collaboration before actually analyzing the data and coming up with some statistical results. Then they need to translate those results to answer the original research question or come up with a conclusion and recommendations for action. You cant just be good with data anymore; you have to be able to communicate why it matters.

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User Churn Prediction. Modern data warehousing and Machine | by Mike Shakhomirov | Dec, 2023 – Towards Data Science

Modern data warehousing and Machine Learning12 min read

No doubt, user retention is a crucial performance metric for many companies and online apps. We will discuss how we can use built-in data warehouse machine learning capabilities to run propensity models on user behaviour data to determine the likelihood of user churn. In this story, I would like to focus on dataset preparation and model training using standard SQL. Modern data warehouses allow this. Indeed, retention is an important business metric that helps understand user behaviours mechanics. It provides a high-level overview of how successful our Application is in terms of retaining users by answering one simple question: Is our App good enough at retaining users? It is a well-known fact that its cheaper to retain an existing user than to acquire a new one.

In one of my previous articles, I wrote about modern data warehousing [1].

Modern DWH has a lot of useful features and components which differentiate them from other data platform types [2].

ML model support seems to be the foundational DWH component when dealing with big data.

In this story, I will use Binary logistic regression, one of the fastest models to train. I will demonstrate how we can use it to predict user propensity to churn. Indeed, We dont need to know every machine-learning model.

We cant compete with cloud service providers such as Amazon ang Google in machine learning and data science but we need to know how to use it.

I previously wrote about it in my article here [3]:

In this tutorial, we will learn how to transform raw event data to create a training dataset for our ML

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User Churn Prediction. Modern data warehousing and Machine | by Mike Shakhomirov | Dec, 2023 - Towards Data Science

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5 Questions Every Data Scientist Should Hardcode into Their Brain – Towards Data Science

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

Despite all the math and programming, data science is more than just analyzing data and building models. When you boil it down, the key objective of data science is to solve problems.

The trouble, however, is that at the outset of most data science projects, we rarely have a well-defined problem. In these situations, the role of the data scientist isnt to have all the answers but to ask the right questions.

In this article, Ill break down 5 questions every data scientist should hardcode into their brain to make problem discovery second nature.

When I began my data science journey in grad school, I had a naive view of the discipline. Namely, I was hyper-focused on learning tools and technologies (e.g. LSTM, SHAP, VAE, SOM, SQL, etc.)

While a technical foundation is necessary to be a successful data scientist, focusing too much on tools creates the Hammer Problem (i.e. when you have a really nice hammer, everything looks like a nail).

This often leads to projects which are intellectually stimulating yet practically useless.

My perspective didnt fully mature until I graduated and joined the data science team at a large enterprise, where I was able to learn from those years (if not decades) ahead of me.

The key lesson was the importance of focusing on problems rather than technologies. What this means is gaining a (sufficiently) deep understanding of the business problem before writing a single line of code.

Since, as data scientists, we typically dont solve our own problems, we gain this understanding through conversations with clients and stakeholders. Getting this right is important because, if you dont, you can end up spending a lot of time (and money) solving the wrong problem. This is where problem discovery questions come in.

6 months ago, I left my corporate data science job to become an independent AI consultant (to fund my entrepreneurial ventures)

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Data Science Career Paths, Skills, and Special Projects: Our Best Reads of 2023 – Towards Data Science

2023 may have been the year of the LLMwe highlighted our most popular articles on ChatGPT and related topics last weekbut data science and machine learning are far too vast for us to reduce them to a single phenomenon (as inescapable as it might be).

Every day, TDS authors publish excellent work on a staggering range of topics, from the latest tools of the trade to career insights and project walkthroughs. For our final Variable edition of the year, we decided to highlight some of the most memorable and widely read posts weve shared around three themes: programming for data scientists, career growth, and and creative projects and opinion pieces. They do a fantastic job showing just how vibrant, diverse, and dynamic this fieldand our communityis.

We hope you enjoy our selection, and thank you once again for all your support over the past year.

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Data Science Career Paths, Skills, and Special Projects: Our Best Reads of 2023 - Towards Data Science

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7 Reasons Why Youre Struggling to Land a Data Science Job – KDnuggets

Tired of applying to data science roles and not hearing back from companies? Perhaps you managed to land a couple of interviews but weren't able to convert them to offers? Well, youre not alone.

The job market is brutally competitive now. So just because it's difficult doesn't mean you're not good enough. That said, it's both important and helpful to take a step back and see how and where you can improve. And thats exactly what this guide will help you with.

Well go over common reasons why aspiring data professionals like you struggle to make the cut. And how you can improve your chances of landing interviews and getting that job you want!

It's a hard truth. So let's face it.

Say youve applied to a bunch of data science roles at companies that youre interested in. And have been shortlisted for interviews.

Congratulations! Youre on the right track. The next goal is to convert the interview opportunity to a job offer. And the first step is to crack that coding interview.

Youll first have a round of timed coding interviewstesting your problem-solving skillsfollowed by an SQL coding round.

But coding interviews are difficult to crackeven for experienced professionals. But consistent practice and spaced repetition can help you successfully crack these interviews.

Regularly practice coding interview questions on platforms like Leetcode and Hackerrank.

If you are looking for resources check out:

Once you clear coding interviews, focus and prepare for technical rounds. Brush up your machine learning fundamentals. Also review your projects so you can explain their impact with confidence.

It is true that recruiters spend only a few seconds reviewing your resume and decide if it proceeds to the next phase or to the reject pile.

So you should put in conscientious efforts to draft your resume. Be sure to tailor your resume based on the job specifications.

Here are a few resume tips:

Ill also suggest using a simple single-column layout that's easier to parse than complicated and fancy layouts.

When youre applying to jobs, your resume and LinkedIn profile should be consistent without any conflicting details. And they should also be aligned with the experience and skill set that the role demands.

There are a couple of caveats you should avoid, though.

Suppose youre interested in medical imaging and computer vision. So almost all your projects are in computer vision. Such a profile may be a great fit for a computer vision engineer or a computer vision researcher role.

But what if youre applying to a data scientist role at a FinTech company? Clearly, you don't stand out as a strong candidate.

If you are an aspiring data scientist with strong SQL skills and experience building machine learning models, you can apply for the roles of data analyst and machine learning engineer as well.

But you don't want to make your resume/candidate profile look like youre someone who wants to be a data analyst, a machine learning engineer, and a data scientistall at once.

If youre interested in all of these roles, have separate resumes for each.

Its important to find a sweet middle ground that allows you to showcase your expertise and stand out as a potential candidate with a broad skill set that is aligned with the jobs requirements.

Your projects help you gain a competitive edge over other candidates. So choose them wisely.

Some aspiring data professionals put on their resume and portfolio certain projects which they shouldn't be. Yes, there are some beginner projects which are good for learningbut you should AVOID showcasing them in your portfolio.

Here are a few:

Just to name a few. These projects are too generic and basic to be able to land you an interview (let alone job offers).

So what are some interesting projectsespecially if you are a beginner who is looking to break into this field?

Here are some beginner-level projects that would help you showcase your skills and emerge as a stronger candidate:

Use real-world datasets to build your projects. This way you can showcase a lot of important skills: data collection, data cleaning, and exploratory data analysis besides model building.

Also include projects that are inspired by your interest. As Id suggested in a previous pandas guide, try turning data from your interests and hobbies into interesting projects that will help you leave an impression on the interviewer.

Another common road block aspiring data professionals face is their educational background. Breaking into data science can be especially difficult if you have majored in a field such as sociology, psychology, and the like.

While your skillshard and soft skillsmatter eventually, you should remember that you are competing with those who have an undergraduate or advanced degree in a related field.

So what can you do about this?

Look for ways to constantly upskill yourself. Remember, once you land your first data role, you can leverage your experience going forward.

Look for ways to work on relevant projects within your company. If your company has a dedicated data team, try to accept a small side project.

Learning in public is super important, especially when you are trying to land your first job (and even after that, honestly).

I started writing online in late 2020. Since then, Ive landed most of my opportunities through my worktutorials and technical deep divesthat I published online.

So how and where do you start? Leverage social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter (X) to share your work with the community:

What you code on your laptop stays on your laptop. So be ready to put yourself out there and share what you build and learn.

Building a strong portfolio and online presence can be immensely helpful in the job search process. Because you never know which project or article might interest your future employer.

Because of how competitive the job market is right now, you have to go beyond just applying to jobsand start being more proactive.

Here are a few simple steps that can help you make the difference:

Joining data science communities online can also be super helpful!

And that's a wrap. Heres a quick review of what weve discussed:

Good luck on your job search journey. I hope you land your data science role soon. What else would you add? Let us know in the comments.

Bala Priya C is a developer and technical writer from India. She likes working at the intersection of math, programming, data science, and content creation. Her areas of interest and expertise include DevOps, data science, and natural language processing. She enjoys reading, writing, coding, and coffee! Currently, she's working on learning and sharing her knowledge with the developer community by authoring tutorials, how-to guides, opinion pieces, and more.

Read more from the original source:

7 Reasons Why Youre Struggling to Land a Data Science Job - KDnuggets

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Inside GPT II. The core mechanics of prompt engineering | by Fatih Demirci | Dec, 2023 | Medium – Towards Data Science

As you can see above with greedy strategy, we append the token with the highest probability to the input sequence and predict the next token.

Using this strategy lets generate a longer text with 128 next tokens using greedy-search decoding.

As you we can see from the text above, although it is the simplest logic, the drawback of this approach is the generated repetitive sequences. As it fails to capture the probabilities of sequences, meaning, the overall probability of a several words coming one after another is overlooked. Greedy search predicts and considers only the probability one step at a time.

Repetitive text is a problem. We would desire our generated output to be concise, how can we achieve it?

Instead of choosing the token that has highest probability at each step, we consider future x-steps and calculate the joint probability(simply multiplication of consecutive probabilities) and choose the next token sequence that is most probable. While x refers to number of beams, it is the depth of the future sequence we look into the future steps. This strategy is known as the beam search.

Lets go back to our example from GPT-2 and explore beam vs greedy search scenarios.

Given the prompt, looking at the two tokens with highest probability and their continuation(4 beams) in a tree diagram

Lets calculate the join probabilities of the green sequences above.

Germany is known for its -> high-quality beer

with the joint probability 3.30%*24.24%*31.26%*6.54% = 0.0016353

whereas the lower path with the sequence;

Germany is known for its -> strong tradition of life

2.28%*2.54%*87.02%*38.26% = 0.0019281.

The bottom sequence overall resulted with the higher joint probability, although the first next token prediction step in the top sequence has higher probability.

While greedy search priorities the absolute maximum probability at each prediction step, it neglects the token probabilities in sequences. Beam search decoding enables us to go in depth of sequences and help us decode text in more extensive fashion. So is beam-search the ultimate solution?

Lets explore further and decode the next 128 tokens with the depth of 5 beams.

Here are 10 of the most beautiful places in Germany.

1. Lake Constance

Lake Constance is one of the largest lakes in Germany.

It is located in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and is the second largest lake in Germany after Lake Constance in Bavaria.

Lake Constance is located in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and is the second largest lake in Germany after Lake Constance in Bavaria.

"""

Although comparatively lesser than the greedy-search, beam-search suffers from repetitive output too. However, with beam search decoding, we can solve this problem by penalising the repeated pairs of word sequences. In other words, the probability of token sequences is assigned zero, if the sequence has already been decoded before. This penalisation of a repeated tokens sequence is also know as n-gram penalty.

While n signifies the length of the sequence, gram is a term that refers to unit in computational linguistic often corresponds to the term token in our case.

The reasoning behind is to discourage the generation of sequences that contain consecutive repeating n-grams. The decoding algorithm will penalise generated sequences that contain repeating pairs of words in the output.

Knowing this, lets apply n-gram penalty of n = 2.

The country's capital, Berlin, is the largest city in Europe, with a population of more than 8.5 million people.

The city is located in the former East Germany, which was divided into East and West Germany after World War II.

Today, Germany is a member of both the European Union and NATO, as well as the World Trade Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).<|endoftext|>

"""

This is the best completion of the input prompt we extracted from the model so far in terms of coherence and compactness. Through n-gram penalisation the output decoded with beam-search became more human-like.

When should we use beam-search and when greedy-search? Where the factualness is paramount, like solving a math problem, key information extraction, summarisation or translation, greedy-search should be preferred. However, when we want to achieve creative output and factuality is not our priority (like it can be in the case of story generation) beam-search is often the better suited approach.

Why exactly does your prompt matter? Because every word you choose to use, the sentence structure, the layout of your instructions will activate different series of parameters in the deep layers of large language model and the probabilities will be formed differently for each different prompt. In the essence of the matter, the text generation is a probability expression conditional on your prompt.

There are also alternative methods to prevent repetitions and influence the factuality/creativity of the generated text, such as truncating the distribution of vocabulary or sampling methods. If you are interested in a higher-level in-depth exploration of the subject, Id highly recommend the article from Patrick von Platen in HuggingFace blog.

Next and the last article of this series will explore fine-tuning and reinforcement learning through human feedback which played an important role on why pre-trained models succeeded to surpass SOTA models in several benchmarks. I hope in this blog post, I was able help you understand the reasoning of prompt engineering better. Many thanks for the read. Until next time.

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Inside GPT II. The core mechanics of prompt engineering | by Fatih Demirci | Dec, 2023 | Medium - Towards Data Science

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