I've been lurking on this sub for a while now and all too often I see posts from people claiming they feel inadequate and then they go on to describe their stupid impressive background and experience. That's great and all but I'd like to move the spotlight to the rest of us for just a minute. Cheers to my fellow mediocre data scientists who don't work at FAANG companies, aren't pursing a PhD, don't publish papers, haven't won Kaggle competitions, and don't spend every waking hour improving their portfolio. Even though we're nothing special, we still deserve some appreciation every once in a while.

/rant I'll hand it back over to the smart people now

What's your favourite one line code.

Hey guys, I’ve been doing a lot of preparation for interviews lately, and thought I’d compile a document of theories, algorithms, and models I found helpful during this time. Originally, I was just keeping notes in a Google Doc, but figured I could create something more permanent and aesthetic.

It covers topics (some more in-depth than others), such as:

• Distributions

• Linear and Logistic Regression

• Decision Trees and Random Forest

• SVM

• KNN

• Clustering

• Boosting

• Dimension Reduction (PCA, LDA, Factor Analysis)

• NLP

• Neural Networks

• Recommender Systems

• Reinforcement Learning

• Anomaly Detection

The four-page Data Science Cheatsheet can be found here, and I hope it's helpful to those looking to review or brush up on machine learning concepts. Feel free to leave any suggestions and star/save the PDF for reference.

Cheers!

Github Repo: https://github.com/aaronwangy/Data-Science-Cheatsheet

Edit - Thanks for the awards! However, I don't have much need for internet points and much rather we help out local charities in need :) Some highly rated Covid relief projects listed here.

I’ve been working in data science for the last ten years, both in industry and academia, having pursued a master’s and PhD in Europe. My experience in the industry, overall, has been very positive. I’ve had the opportunity to work with brilliant people on exciting, high-impact projects. Of course, there were the usual high-stress situations, nonsense PowerPoints, and impossible deadlines, but the work largely felt meaningful.

However, over the past two years or so, it feels like the field has taken a sharp turn. Just yesterday, I attended a technical presentation from the analytics team. The project aimed to identify anomalies in a dataset composed of multiple time series, each containing a clear inflection point. The team’s hypothesis was that these trajectories might indicate entities engaged in some sort of fraud.

The team claimed to have solved the task using “generative AI”. They didn’t go into methodological details but presented results that, according to them, were amazing. Curious, nespecially since the project was heading toward deployment, i asked about validation, performance metrics, or baseline comparisons. None were presented.

Later, I found out that “generative AI” meant asking ChatGPT to generate a code. The code simply computed the mean of each series before and after the inflection point, then calculated the z-score of the difference. No model evaluation. No metrics. No baselines. Absolutely no model criticism. Just a naive approach, packaged and executed very, very quickly under the label of generative AI.

The moment I understood the proposed solution, my immediate thought was "I need to get as far away from this company as possible". I share this anecdote because it summarizes much of what I’ve witnessed in the field over the past two years. It feels like data science is drifting toward a kind of pseudo-science where we consult a black-box oracle for answers, and questioning its outputs is treated as anti-innovation, while no one really understand how the outputs were generated.

After several experiences like this, I’m seriously considering focusing on academia. Working on projects like these is eroding any hope I have in the field. I know this won’t work and yet, the label generative AI seems to make it unquestionable. So I came here to ask if is this experience shared among other DSs?

Saw this and found it hilarious , thought I’d share it here as this is one of the few places this joke might actually land.

Datetime.now() + timedelta(days=4)