Estimating When CitiBike Rolled Out E-Bikes Using Change Point Detection
Mar 21, 2021
If electric bikes allow their riders to travel at greater speeds, will there be a corresponding dip in average trip duration between bikeshare docks that we can find in the data? We try to answer that question by applying a change point model to a notoriously difficult uphill route.
Visualizing How a Kernel Draws a Smooth Line
Feb 13, 2021
How does software like Excel or R trace a smooth line through a series of points? It’s easier to understand by visualizing how new values are created as a weighted mean of the existing data.
Gradient Ascent: Finding Uphill Routes for my Long Walks
Jan 23, 2021
An old back injury makes it so that walking uphill is much more comfortable for me than walking downhill. A programmatic search for uphill routes reveals how strict constraints and “greedy” decisions can lead to sub-optimal results.
Avoiding Variance on my Morning Commute
Jan 10, 2021
Sacrificing value for certainty is a common tradeoff in life. Is this what I was (accidentally) doing when I started walking the first part of my daily commute instead of taking the subway? Some historical MTA data can help answer that question.
Pushing Google's Autocorrect to the Limit
Dec 26, 2020
Everyone makes errors sometimes when hastily typing a query into a search bar, and most of the time Google is able to recognize your mistake and offer a suggestion. But what is this algorithm’s breaking point? How badly can you mis-type a word before even Google doesn’t know what you mean anymore?
