Musings on data quality — “This is wrong.” — key stakeholder I dreaded hearing that phrase (and variations of it) when showing dashboards to project stakeholders. I would have a lot of anxiety around data analytics projects in the beginning because I didn’t want to fail. …

Guidance for determining whether your model is successful in the context of your goals — If you are new to machine learning and you developed a classification model, then congrats! You might be thinking, “now what?” That’s a great question. With auto ML technology, model creation is more accessible than ever. The difficulty lies in determining if that model is any good. In this article…

Explanations, Alteryx use cases, and more — Machine Learning (ML) just sounds cool-doesn’t it? Maybe it’s because I’m a nerd, or maybe it is cool. Regardless, you’re probably used to hearing buzz around this topic. (Or at least seeing TV and movies that play with the concepts.) If you are not from a data science…

From Engineering Student to Consultant to Data Analyst to Data Journalist — Hello! If you are new to following my blog, let me introduce myself: my name is Megan Dibble, and I am a Data Journalist at Alteryx. Data Journalist? That’s a title? That was my first thought when I interviewed for the position. I would never have imagined being in a…

Knowing these common logic traps will help you avoid making mistakes in your analysis — In a recent article, I defined data literacy by starting with the general definition of literacy and adapting it to the data world: What Is Data Literacy? …and why is it important?towardsdatascience.com This article follows a similar thread — it was inspired by the logical fallacies I learned in high school. If there are logical errors you can make…

Determining Song Sentiment with Text Mining — Do you ever feel “happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time?” Well, Taylor Swift does. (Or she did, at 22.) There’s a lot of emotion in this song-some positive, some negative, and some neutral. And this got me thinking: can I determine the overall mood of her…

& what I’ve learned in my career in data thus far — For the last month, when people have asked me what I do for work, I’ve said, “I guess I’m like… a journalist now?” I don’t know the right way to say it because it doesn't fit with my college degree, and I don’t see myself as a professional writer (yet). …

How Alteryx is making ML easy, automated, and accessible — In the last ten years, “machine learning” (ML) has increased in popularity as a search term on Google. The chart below illustrates the interest relative to peak interest. Since around 2018, the data shows that people worldwide want to know more about machine learning. But… isn’t machine learning for data…

Let’s make data science writing more readable — I recently learned about a metric for evaluating the readability of writing: the Flesch Reading Ease score. It was developed back in the 1940s, but it is new to me. …