woensdag 17 april 2019

Google colaboratry: datajournalists' little helper

Jupyter notebooks are very helpful to share and publish your R code. See more: https://d3-media.blogspot.com/2017/09/jupyter-notebook.html .  However one has to install the software. Now Google has an interesting solution: jupyter notebooks online. To access the notebook go to Google drive and look for colab or colaboratry. If not present install the app: drive, new, more , connect to apps. There is one limitation, that is you can only use python code. Pity because I like R better.

Start to enter the code or add comment  with #. Run the code immediately to see the result. The amazing thing is that you have access to all kind of machine learning software like 'random forest' or 'tensor-flow'. And you run your code free on a GPU. Try to build a model for your prediction.
Here is an example to build a classification.


Of course Google offers help to get started: https://colab.research.google.com/notebooks/welcome.ipynb or try this intro with lot's of extra info: https://towardsdatascience.com/getting-started-with-google-colab-f2fff97f594c .
There is also a free book online to introduce python and the basics of data science: https://github.com/jakevdp/PythonDataScienceHandbook