As it was a Tuesday, today started with my last coffee, morning snacks, and project updates time here at DSSG. Basically our group just reported how we're making progress with the rescheduler, making headway with the web app stuff, and doing some final analyses, which include me making the projections reproducible. It seems like all the groups are wrapping up, especially the Predictors for Permanent Housing group, since they have to present to their shareholders this Thursday! Exciting times around here at the eScience Center.
In the morning I asked Valentina if by any chance she could help me with the sticky SQL situation I had been dealing with yesterday. After lots of different attempts, we finally were able to put our two heads together and find a solution that was able to work in Access (you wouldn't believe how difficult it can be to find valid SQL commands for Access specifically sometimes). If you'll recall from yesterday, I was having trouble with the COUNT function because it didn't include zero values for the days that had no runs at the specified hour. Basically, my Excel worksheet was looking like this:
In the morning I asked Valentina if by any chance she could help me with the sticky SQL situation I had been dealing with yesterday. After lots of different attempts, we finally were able to put our two heads together and find a solution that was able to work in Access (you wouldn't believe how difficult it can be to find valid SQL commands for Access specifically sometimes). If you'll recall from yesterday, I was having trouble with the COUNT function because it didn't include zero values for the days that had no runs at the specified hour. Basically, my Excel worksheet was looking like this:
This is bad because we don't have the same number of rows for each column, which will be necessary when we want to make our projections. In the end, instead of using COUNT we used a combination of IFF (immediate if statement) to mark zero or one if there was a run at that hour for that data entry and SUM to count the number of runs at that hour. Check out the StackOverflow question I posted if you're curious about the exact syntax. Now our code looks like this:
After that significant success story, all I need to do is finish up the VBA code to correctly make the graphs, which hopefully won't take too long tomorrow.
Also, today Joe met with us in the afternoon to do a quick demo and code review of the web app branch so far. It was cool to see how it can integrate python when we use flask, and I'm just generally interested in web applications and design so I thought that was pretty neat. It looks like we should be on schedule to get the web app portion done on time for the presentation too, which is always a good sign.
I almost forgot! This morning after coffee hour and project updates Frank gave a really cool presentation on easier machine learning techniques and how to make some basic mathematical models when working on data sets, particularly the kind they might give you in programming interviews nowadays. I highly recommend checking it out at his github site if you get the chance. I know I plan on looking back at it more closely later, and I might use it as a resource in future projects.
Also, today Joe met with us in the afternoon to do a quick demo and code review of the web app branch so far. It was cool to see how it can integrate python when we use flask, and I'm just generally interested in web applications and design so I thought that was pretty neat. It looks like we should be on schedule to get the web app portion done on time for the presentation too, which is always a good sign.
I almost forgot! This morning after coffee hour and project updates Frank gave a really cool presentation on easier machine learning techniques and how to make some basic mathematical models when working on data sets, particularly the kind they might give you in programming interviews nowadays. I highly recommend checking it out at his github site if you get the chance. I know I plan on looking back at it more closely later, and I might use it as a resource in future projects.