In a previous post we wrote an article about an RShiny app for exploring traffic accidents in Scotland. Unfortunately, if we wanted to run this application today, we would face compatibility issues. Imagine, if as an organisation we decided to deploy this application somewhere else or a colleague, client or any user wanted to run […]
python
Keeping up to date with technical advances: Python versus Tableau for data visualisations
Python is great, but… Since taking up Python several years ago I’ve often thought of it as the Swiss Army Knife of programming languages. After successfully using it for webscraping, software development, number-crunching and data visualisation one achieves a certain level of comfort in knowing that, if you need to do it in code, you […]
Excel-like functionality with Python pandas: The Data Lab takes the Pepsi Challenge!
Happy Birthday Excel! I would posit that the world’s most used data science software is the ubiquitous Microsoft Excel. Released for Windows in November 1987, this month marks its 30th anniversary. In that time I’d imagine it has been employed by all manner of people across near all industries: from the fund manager tracking his […]
Snakes and Ladders (Part 3 of 3): Analysing the classic children’s game
To recap the analysis from our previous article, we have now shown that the advantage to Player 1 in snakes and ladders is minimal (amounting to less than 6 extra wins out of every 1,000 games). In this post we look at visualising some results, focusing in particular on the distribution of game lengths and the […]
Snakes and Ladders (Part 2 of 3): Analysing the classic children’s game
In the previous post in this series, we set out the basic Python code required to simulate a single game of snakes and ladders. In order to analyse the game in more detail we will be required to simulate multiple random games so that we can look at certain properties, such as expected game lengths, […]
Snakes and Ladders (Part 1 of 3): Analysing the classic children’s game
In this short series of three blog posts we show how easy it can be to take an everyday activity and analyse it using Python, gaining insights that might illuminate or in some cases even surprise… Anyone who has ever played games against young children knows that they absolutely must go first, and my daughter Eva is […]