Note: (This is a continuation of a previous article in which I explained how to download and plot a heatmap of thousand of tweets sent from my hometown.) You can find the code I used for this tutorial in github. I also uploaded the tweets file so you can follow along without having to download the tweets by yourself. On this post, I will focus on how to perform Sentiment Analysis on a Spanish corpus. Read more

I have been wanting to play with the Twitter API for a long time. Last summer, I thought that it would be interesting to plot a map of my hometown (Murcia, Spain, very nice city with amazing food) showing a heatmap of tweets. The idea is that by plotting those tweets, I could find interesting insights about my city, such as: In which areas are people tweeting the most Which times of the day are the most active Which are the happiest/saddest places Are there any foreign twitter communities? Read more

Recurrent Neural Networks have boomed in popularity over the past months, thanks to articles like the amazing The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks by Andrej Karpathy. Long story short, Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are a type of NNs that can work over sequences of vectors and where their elements keep track of their state history. Neural Networks are increasingly easy to use, specially in the Python ecosystem, with libraries like Caffe, Keras or Lasagne making the assembly of neural networks a trivial task. Read more

Quick note, might save some headaches to future me. COPY {name} FROM 's3://{bucket_name}/data-{name}' credentials 'aws_access_key_id={AWS_ACCESS_KEY};aws_secret_access_key={AWS_SECRET_KEY}' CSV IGNOREHEADER as 1 GZIP DATEFORMAT as 'auto' ACCEPTANYDATE ; The trick is to use DATEFORMAT as 'auto' ACCEPTANYDATE

Following the example of [Bill Gates](), here is the list of the best books I read this year: Work Data Science for Business, by Foster Provost. This book is hands down, the perfect book for those who want to get into the amazing world of Data Science. It starts from a very high level point, and drills down to the equations and reasoning underlying each Machine Learning Algorithm. It is also a good book for those like us who want to find good analogies to explain highly mathematical models to those who are not so knowledgeable. Read more