A Texas Tenor

What make a professional? A professional has the ability to execute the correct decisions at the correct time.  Amateurs are missing one of these components more often than not. A professional is practiced and practice prepares and hones our ability to execute.  We may have the knowledge to make a prediction but without the ability to execute we fall short of the mark and failure to execute at all is where most of us live. This is how I feel about my data analytics and prediction skills.  Sometimes I am so hampered by making the correct decision, that I fail to make any decision at all.  Except in one area of my life and that is music.  When I play music (on my saxophone), I am forced to execute according to a variety of conditions.  When I play in a concert band, with an arranged piece of music (all the notes written out for me) then my execution comes down to my ability to play the notes set forth in time according to the conductor. When I play ...

My Learning Process. My goal in these posts is to put down information about data science and the branches of science that it build itself upon. I initially (2 years ago) was interested in using R to build predictive models and I was able to build some predictive models using R and my basic introduction to how machine learning and data models can be used to produce a predicted value. The website I was into was from the good folks at https://www.analyticsinhr.com/blog/tutorial-people-analytics-r-employee-churn/ I was largely using my technical/programming skills to take advantage of what I largely did not understand, Statistics.  How do you go about statistics?  Where do I begin and what do I learn first?  So, after a some time spent on a software implementation, I was left with the choice of learning this process.  I decided to leave R for Python after listening to the outstanding podcast  https://talkpython.fm/  Talk Python to Me.   I wa...