All posts of Ian

PyDataLondon 2018 and “Creating Correct and Capable Classifiers”

This weekend we ran PyDataLondon 2018, the fifth iteration of our conference (connected with our monthly PyDataLondon meetup). This year we grew to 500 attendees! Read about the past PyDataLondon 2017 here. Updates – videos are online, reportedly we raised £91,000 towards open source support for NumFOCUS via ticket sales & sponsorship (all the London […]

AHL Python Data Hackathon

Yesterday I got to attend Man AHL’s first London Python Data hackathon (21-22 April – photos online). I went with the goal of publishing my ipython_memory_usage tool from GitHub to PyPI (success!), updating the docs (success!) and starting to work on the YellowBrick project (partial-success). This is AHL’s first crack at running a public Python […]

PyData Conference & AHL Hackathon

Our 5th annual PyDataLondon conference will run this April 27-29th, this year we grow from 330 to 500 attendees. As before this remains a volunteer-run conference (with support from the lovely core NumFOCUS team), just as the monthly meetup is a volunteer-run event. The Call for Proposals is open until the start of March (you have 2 weeks!) – first time speakers are […]

Python Data Science jobs list into 2018

I’ve been building my data-science jobs list for a couple of years now. Almost 800 folk are on the list, they receive an email update once every two weeks containing around seven job ads. Many active members of PyDataLondon are on the list. The ads are mostly London-based, a few spread into Europe. In addition […]

PyDataBudapest and “Machine Learning Libraries You’d Wish You’d Known About”

I’m back at BudapestBI and this year it has its first PyDataBudapest track. Budapest is fun! I’ve had a second iteration talking on a slightly updated “Machine Learning Libraries You’d Wish You’d Known About” (updated from PyDataCardiff two weeks back). When I was here to give an opening keynote talk two years back the conference […]

Kaggle’s Mercedes-Benz Greener Manufacturing

Kaggle are running a regression machine learning competition with Mercedes-Benz right now, it closes in a week and runs for about 6 weeks overall. I’ve managed to squeeze in 5 days to have a play (I managed about 10 days on the previous Quora competition). My goal this time was to focus on new tools […]

Kaggle’s Quora Question Pairs Competition

Kaggle‘s Quora Question Pairs competition has just closed, I’m pleased to say that with 10 days effort I ranked in the top 39th percentile (rank 1346 of 3396 in the private leaderboard). Having just run and spoken at PyDataLondon 2017, taught ML in Romania and worked on several client projects I only freed up time […]

PyDataLondon 2017 Conference write-up

Several weeks back we ran our 4th PyDataLondon (2017) conference – it was another smashing success! This builds on our previous 3 years of effort (2016, 2015, 2014) building both the conference and our over-subscribed monthly meetup. We’re grateful to our host Bloomberg for providing the lovely staff, venue and catering. Really got inspired by […]

Introduction to Random Forests for Machine Learning at the London Python Meetup

Last night I had the pleasure of returning to London Python to introduce Random Forests (this builds on my PyConUK 2016 talk from September). My goal was to give a pragmatic introduction to solving a binary classification problem (Kaggle’s Titanic) using scikit-learn. The talk (slides here) covers: Organising your data with Pandas Exploratory Data Visualisation […]