
Ask HN: Do any of you do data science as a hobby? - RealAnalysis
I work in mergers &amp; acquisitions (math major undergrad, Python classes) but enjoy looking at interesting financial and non-financial datasets in what little free time I have.<p>What project(s) have you worked on? Can a self-taught hobby data scientist produce solid&#x2F;meaningful statistical analysis&#x2F;results products?
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minimaxir
While working as a Software QA Engineer at Apple, I wrote a large amount of
statistical blog posts to get a breadth of skills outside of my role (story:
[http://minimaxir.com/2017/05/leaving-
apple/](http://minimaxir.com/2017/05/leaving-apple/))

I did have a statistical background before starting at Apple however. Most of
my projects were self-taught and done as self-research (I am not a fan of the
take-a-million-MOOCs strategy everyone likes).

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RealAnalysis
Thanks for the link!

I'm mostly interested in self-research.

How'd you know you were doing sound stats?

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usgroup
Oh that's easy ... put money on it, it'll make you a better statistician in no
time.

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cuchoi
With a team of data-scientists-as-a-hobby, we are building www.17-56.cl, which
displays insights from data about Chile. It is in Spanish, but feel free to
look around. For example, I created a map that displays the votation in the
Chilean primary elections:
[http://fernandoi.cl/mapascomunales/primarias/primarias.html](http://fernandoi.cl/mapascomunales/primarias/primarias.html).
Simple, but informative and fun.

Probably as a hobby you will not be able to write an analysis that will get
published in a paper, but there is a lot of descriptive analysis out there
that can be very interesting.

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ivm
Awesome, I saw that we have so much data published by the government but it
was always buried in endless spreadsheets. Thanks for working on this!

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cuchoi
Yes, it is mostly government data! Also, this year there are presidential
election in Chile so there is a bias towards that topic.

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thenomad
Yup, from time to time. I also use data science in one side of my business
(online marketing), but as a hobby I periodically do data analysis of the
computer game DOTA2.

There's a large (huge, actually) available dataset, and lots of interesting
information you can mine comparatively easily.

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navalsaini
I like doing data science courses for fun. These days I am reading CS 229
mathematics and a book Python Machine Learning. Once in a while I get tired of
coding in JS, or adding things to side projects; and then I like doing simple
learning, just for the sake of learning and trying to understand (no strings
attached). I like the maths part of data-science and maybe would pursue it as
a theoretical endeavor. Or just repeat what people have posted on GitHub and
see the results - like kids soldiering circuits. It would be fun to take part
in some Kaggle competitions next year, around healthcare. Back in 2014, I
spent some time working on an SVM classifier for news.

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riku_iki
My project is [https://finintelligence.com](https://finintelligence.com)

It provides access to public/private companies financials, documents search
and some custom reports. I have tons of ideas in my mind: configurable stream
of companies events, alerts, intelligent search for companies data, etc.

I launched it just about a month ago, so it is still in a semi-stealth
prototype mode, but I am happy to receive any feedback, feature requests and
first real users )

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gesman
Built model + app (Splunk app) to predict medicare and opioid prescription
fraud based on published medicare claims datasets at data.cms.gov

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jklein11
How did you know which claims were fraudulent?

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RealAnalysis
I'm really just wanting to do my own self research on topics and datasets that
seem interesting, but also want to ensure the analysis im doing is sound.

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usgroup
Learn to cross validate. Typically by predicting something out-of-sample. Or
by sense checking what your model says about things you're sure about.

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SirLJ
Absolutely, been doing it for years with stock market data and Python -
developing trading algos and very successfully I might add, actually I can
retire tomorrow, but every year I am postponing, because of the team I lead...

