DESIGN GUIDE PART 1: Framework & Layouts

We, at the Starschema Dataviz Team, work a lot with data and information design every day. Our main goal is to make our data visualization output effective, accessible, and provide accurate…

Data Visualization

DESIGN GUIDE PART 2: Framework & Layouts

Did you enjoy our previous post about frameworks & layouts in Tableau? Here we continue that thread by exploring how applying those rules can improve your overall design through some practical…

Data Science

Fighting the COVID-19 pandemic with data and context

The COVID-19 outbreak is in many ways an outlier. It emerged with unusual speed, spread rapidly throughout the globe and has elicited a public health response that is unprecedented in recent…

Data Science

Draw a map of the districts of Budapest using the Overpass API of OpenStreetMap and Python

Ever wondered how to draw a map of less common geographical areas? Perhaps even colour them based on some data? This is the first in a series of two tutorials that show you how to build this from…

Data Science

COVID-19 and the first war of data science - Starschema Blog - Medium

In the subtitle of his remarkable history about the race for the nuclear bomb, science writer and historian of science Jim Baggott referred to World War II as the “first war of physics”. Today, the…

Data Science

Arguing with Edward Snowden - Starschema Blog - Medium

I’ve recently read Edward Snowden’s Permanent Record during my holiday. I think it is a great book that I highly recommend for basically anyone, however it is particularly interesting for IT-folks…

Data Visualization

Do the Rosling - Starschema Blog - Medium

Anyone who has learned Tableau online (via Udemy or any other similar platform) did the Hans Rosling chart as an exercise. So did I, and I felt it was time to do justice to that old visualization…

Data Engineering

Deploying TabPy in Enterprise: Scaling and Hardening in Kubernetes

There are so many tutorials out in the wild about how to take an application, containerize it and run it in your enterprise’s on-prem/public cloud securely, but hey, this will be yet another one…

Data Visualization

ITSM Analytics - Starschema Blog - Medium

Information Technology has become the backbone of almost every business in the last few decades, driving productivity and efficiency in every business function. Today, IT organizations have more…

Data Visualization

Tableau Extensions Addons Introduction: Synchronized Scrollbars

At this year’s Tableau Conference, I tried to stay on the safe side and show mostly Tableau supported solutions: visualizations on real-time data, Jupyer Notebook like experiences and so on. I had…

Data Visualization

Tableau External Services API: Haskell Expressions as Calculations

We all have our own Tableau Conference habits. Mine is to participate in the first-day hackathon, build something super cool that nobody understands and in the end win nothing. Tableau 2019 was no…

Data Science

Text preprocessing in different languages for Natural Language Processing in Python

In the first part, I outlined text pre-processing principles based on a framework from an academic article. The underlying goal of all these techniques was to reduce text data dimensionality but…

Data Visualization

Here’s how we upgraded our marketing analytics - Starschema Blog - Medium

I hate interrupting my analysis workflow by tabbing between different applications and interfaces. It’s irritating, decreases your productivity and just makes things harder to understand. Therefore…

Data Science

Self-Organising Feature Maps for fun and profit - Chris von Csefalvay - Medium

This is Part 2 of a three-part series on competitive neural networks. You can find Part 1, an introduction to competitive neural networks, here. Part 3, which looks at a different competitive…

Data Visualization

Get Ready for Tableau Catalog - Starschema Blog - Medium

If you’re a Tableau administrator or author, your life is going to get a lot easier. For Tableau Server deployments, particularly large ones, managing your data can be complicated. Under the hood…

Data Engineering

Text preprocessing in different languages for Natural Language Processing in Python

In the first part, I outlined text pre-processing principles based on a framework from an academic article. The underlying goal of all these techniques was to reduce text data dimensionality but…

Data Science

Predictive maintenance helped win a war. Now, it can help you outpace the competition.

The year is 1943. Britain’s survival still hangs by a thin, precarious thread, despite America joining the war effort. Just a few months ago, in February 1942, two German battleships, the…

Data Engineering

Mining your Tableau logs with Apache Drill - Starschema Blog - Medium

Tableau Server and Desktop logs each and every action you perform. The log data is a gold mine for people eager to understand what is happening under the hood and why. However, there is no easy way…

Data Engineering

Scaling out Tableau Extracts — Building a distributed Tableau Hyper Cluster

Tableau Hyper Database (“Extract”) is a great engine; it’s one of the reasons people are obsessed with Tableau analytics. However, being a single node database server, it has its limits (performance…

Data Science

A comprehensive guide to text pre-processing with python

This is Part 1 of a pair of tutorials on text pre-processing in python. In this first part, I’ll lay out the theoretical foundations. In the second part, I’ll demonstrate the steps described below…

Data Visualization

Your Tableau Dashboard is Watching You — You Are Being Tracked

Data analysts work on improving your dashboard, and developing new features day and night, over the weekend, with eating or drinking being a low priority. Tableau end users then enjoy the fruit of…

Data Science

Quantifying hard retinal exudates using Growing Neural Gas algorithms

Diabetic retinopathy is a major cause of blindness in the developed world. Read how an uncommon neural network algorithm can be used to quantify the extent of disease.

Data Science

Self-Organising Feature Maps for fun and profit - Starschema Blog - Medium

This is Part 2 of a three-part series on competitive neural networks. You can find Part 1, an introduction to competitive neural networks, here. Part 3, which looks at a different competitive…

Data Science

Funderstanding competitive neural networks - Starschema Blog - Medium

Funderstanding is a little term I came up with a few years ago for fun ways of understanding complex concepts. The typical university way of teaching something is by laying the theoretical…

Data Science

Growing Neural Gas for Good: quantifying hard retinal exudates in diabetic retinopathy using GNGs

Diabetic retinopathy is a major cause of blindness in the developed world. Read how an uncommon neural network algorithm can be used to quantify the extent of disease.

Data Science

Digging deeper into ensemble learning - Starschema Blog - Medium

Have you ever wondered how combining weak predictors can yield a strong predictor? Ensemble Learning is the answer! This is the second of a pair of articles in which I will explore ensemble learning…

Data Science

Combine your machine learning models for better out-of-sample accuracy

Have you ever wondered how combining weak predictors can yield a strong predictor? Ensemble Learning is the answer! This is the first of a pair of articles in which I will explore ensemble learning…

Data Science

Create a map of Budapest districts colored by income using folium in Python

Ever wondered how to draw a map of less common geographical areas? And color them based on some data? This pair of tutorials shows how to build this from scratch! First, you need to construct the…

Data Science

JIT fast! Supercharge tensor processing in Python with JIT compilation

At Starschema, we’re constantly looking for ways to speed up some of the computationally intensive tasks we’re dealing with. Since a good amount of our work involves image processing, this means…

Data Science

Answering the big questions (this time, in chemistry)

Why do some molecules have undesirable biological effects, but others don’t? A model can tell us which do and which don’t, but model introspection can go one step further: it can tell us why.

Data Visualization

Tableau Conference 2018 Guide - Starschema Blog - Medium

We have invited the best and brightest of our “data musicians” to create the festival of data at the birthplace of jazz. Sounds like music to your ears? Tableau Conference 2018 has a mission. To…

Data Visualization

YOUR DASHBOARD IS WATCHING YOU — YOU ARE BEING TRACKED

Data analysts work on improving your dashboard, and developing new features day and night, over the weekend, with eating or drinking being a low priority. Tableau end users then enjoy the fruit of…

Data Visualization

EXTENSIONS IN TABLEAU AND “EXTENSIONS” ACROSS THE OCEAN

Nowadays, we are big on extensions. Starschema opened its new office across the Pond in D.C. Settling into our office in a usual American highrise building, many people wanted to know what our…

Data Visualization

Elevation, Voronoi and other spatial specialties in Tableau

People are generally lazy, but the laziness can be overridden through aesthetically pleasing content. We want visualizations that effortlessly communicates the core idea. The new Tableau Mapbox…

Data Visualization

Employee turnover dashboard for your HR department.

“The ratio of the number of employees that leave a company through attrition, dismissal, or resignation during a period to the number of employees on payroll during the same period.” —…

Data Visualization

Tableau Version Control is here to make your life easier

If you are a Tableau server admin or interact with your Tableau admin, then the chances of you desperately crying out for their help over some accidental action is a quiet common possibility…

Data Visualization

ITSM Analytics - Starschema Blog - Medium

Information Technology has become the backbone of almost every business in the last few decades, driving productivity and efficiency in every business function. Today, IT organizations have more…

Data Visualization

Here’s how we upgraded our marketing analytics - Starschema Blog - Medium

I hate interrupting my analysis workflow by tabbing between different applications and interfaces. It’s irritating, decreases your productivity and just makes things harder to understand. Therefore…

Data Visualization

Draw a map of the districts of Budapest using the Overpass API of OpenStreetMap and Python

Ever wondered how to draw a map of less common geographical areas? Perhaps even colour them based on some data? This is the first in a series of two tutorials that show you how to build this from…

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