Breaking Changes

A data science blog

  1. To follow up my two previous posts where I analysed ingredient lists and ratings for dessert recipes, I decided to make a Shiny app to explore the data interactively. You can find the app here. (As a quick aside, to deploy my Shiny app on AWS I relied heavily on Charles Bordet’s excellent and comprehensive guide.) You can select an ingredient either by clicking a point on the plot or by selecting it from the dropdown. Read More…

  2. In a previous post, I explored ingredient lists from dessert recipes from the website taste.com.au. In this post, I’ll be using that dataset to identify ingredients that influence a recipe’s rating (whether negatively or positively). As a reminder, my main questions are: How well does ingredient composition predict the rating of a recipe? Which individual ingredients contribute to high and low scores? Which combinations of ingredients contribute to high and low scores? Read More…

  3. In this post I’ll talk about what I learned from two courses I recently took on Coursera: Visual Elements of User Interface Design and UX Design Fundamentals (both taught by Michael Worthington from the California Institute of the Arts). I decided to learn more about user interface and experience (UI/UX) design for two main reasons. Firstly, as I’ve got deeper into the world of Shiny apps and dashboards, I often find myself making decisions about how I want things to look and behave. Read More…

  4. If you enjoy cooking, you might be familiar with a book called the Flavour Bible. You can look up an ingredient and find lists of other ingredients that go well with it, with an emphasis on interesting or unusual combinations. It’s an amazing resource for discovering creative combinations of ingredients. In this series of posts, I’ll try to create something similar using a dataset of ingredient lists and their ratings. Read More…

  5. After completing a personality test as part of a job application, I recently became interested in the science and statistics of personality testing. This is part of the field of psychometrics, which is concerned with the measurement of mental traits and aptitudes. Psychometrics is a fascinating field in itself, but the more I read the more I started to see parallels between the challenges of personality testing and those of unsupervised learning. Read More…