Guest technical blog by Garry McFarlane, Senior Analyst and Dr. Paul van Loon, Head of Analytics, both at Forecast. Garry and Paul were scheduled to speak at DataTech20, and have kindly presented us with this blog instead. Enjoy. What is uplift modelling? Targeted marketing is so commonplace, nearly synonymous to online marketing, that consumers […]
Technical Skills
Synthetic data in machine learning
Machine learning algorithms are currently applied in multiple scenarios in which unbalanced datasets or overall lack of sufficient training data lead to their suboptimal performance. For example, approaches focusing on disease prediction are often affected because data in the health sector is generally difficult to acquire and disease training examples are limited. Fraud detection in […]
Using Generalised Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) to Predict Visitors to Edinburgh and Craigmillar Castles
I’d been curious about generalised additive (mixed) models for some time, and the opportunity to learn more about them finally presented itself when a new project came my way, as part of my work at The Data Lab. The aim of this project was to understand the pattern of visitors recorded at two historic sites […]
Our “How to get Started” guide for Predictive Maintenance
Predictive Maintenance is a popular application of predictive analytics that can help businesses in several industries achieve high asset utilisation and savings in operational costs. Predictive Maintenance (PdM) directly monitors the condition and performance of assets during normal operation to reduce the likelihood of failures. It seeks to predict when maintenance is required; maximising the lifespan of an […]
Using Shiny for interactive displays of health data: The Scottish Burden of Diseases
The Accelerator programme run by The Data Lab between 19 April 2018 – 06 September 2018 was a Scottish Government collaborative project, open to employees of the Scottish Government, the Information Services Division, the National Records of Scotland and Registers of Scotland. Employees applying to take part had a background in statistics, economics, operational research and social […]
Four tips for creating interactive visualisations with Shiny
I’ve recently presented a toy Shiny app at the Edinburgh Data Visualization Meetup to demonstrate how Shiny can be used to explore data interactively. In my code-assisted walkthrough, I began by discussing the data used: a set of records detailing customer purchases made on Black Friday (i.e., each customer was given a unique ID, which was repeated […]
Interactive Intelligence: Human-In-The-Loop Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning has captured a large share of academic and industry attention during recent years, both in terms of new capabilities and the implications to society. Many state-of-the-art techniques are able to provide important capabilities for different fields, yet we are far from creating artificial general intelligence. Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) is a branch […]
Generative Adversarial Networks – when AI gets creative
Since Frank Rosenblatt introduced the Perceptron in 1958, neural networks have significantly evolved and taken the world by storm. Their ability to model complex, non-linear relationships that exist in data, led to novel neural network architectures, able to outperform humans in various challenging tasks like face recognition, disease prognosis and playing video games. However, even […]
The blockchain and how it could solve our recycling problems
Guest blog from Stewart McGrenary, Managing Director of Plunc.com Attention is constantly drawn to Scotland’s recycling problem from a number of different angles, highlighting various subjects such as e-waste, plastic recycling or a hard look at the recycling industry in general. However, the increase of recyclable waste still making its way into landfill is the […]
An R-based App for Exploring Traffic Accidents in Scotland
Recently I discovered that the UK government collects detailed information about traffic accidents across the country that are being reported to the police. What’s even more interesting is that all these data are being uploaded and made publicly available on the government’s open data website. This dataset, being so rich, immediately caught my attention. I […]