I mistakenly thought I would have time to blog, and I apologize to anyone who has been waiting for me to post something new to read. Life, both personal and professional, has been going well but has also been extremely busy.
One thing that I would like to comment on before I go any further is the progress I have made through Coursera. I have been taking courses in both the Data Science specialization track (here) and in the Python for Everybody track (here).
The Data Science track, offered by Johns Hopkins University, has been a great hands-on crash course for using R -- something I have been playing with for years, but never went much further than creating some basic visualizations. Right now, I am finishing up the certificate program with the capstone project course which combines lessons from the previous courses and adds a twist: performing some Natural Language Processing (NLP). For this project, JHU/Coursera has partnered with SwiftKey to make data available to the students and provide some background on how NLP works.
The Python for Everybody track has been a great experience with learning Python, especially since my programming skills were pretty minimal. This is offered through University of Michigan and taught by Dr. Chuck Severance. So far, I have completed the first three courses in the series. I have gotten a decent grasp of the basics of using Python, and I am looking forward to using it more while performing data analysis.
Now for the future of this blog. It shall continue. I am currently working on two posts: one going back to my interest in oil prices and the other visualizing some macroeconomic variables (interest rates, stock market values, etc.) in the global market. I plan on having at least one posted next month, as soon as I complete my capstone project.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
