The road to learning about analytics, statistics and data science is a long and sometimes treacherous path. The journey is full of moments of pure wonder and amazement, which tend to be followed (immediately) by confusion and despair. Data, and the messages within it are messy, and it’s not uncommon to not see the woods for the trees.

A bit about Andy

I’m an Environmental Scientist, with a long history of using GIS and have been excited about Statistics and Data Science for years. On my Data Science journey, I’ve met a ton of exceptionally talented analysts, but I’ve noticed that they usually have a background in either IT, finance, marketing or biostatistics (probably because that’s where the money is…).

So I’m always surprised and super excited whenever I meet another Enviro/Geo/Earth Scientist/Engineer who’s on the data science bandwagon.

And one of these chance meeting just happened while admiring Mt Sturgeon. We thought we’d set up this site, to share what we learn in an effort to bottle up the enthusiasm and let it brew into something great (or at least have a list of cool things to remember). We know the site is called Mt Disappointment not Mt Sturgeon – just seemed more fitting to have our project named after a feeling, than a fish.

A bit about Alex

I’m an engineer, with an interest in data science and visualisation. I’m not as whippy as Andy, but I got into this field (using data to make decisions in uncertainty) while studying avalanches in Canada. Avalanches tend to be difficult to observe, predict and plan for in an engineering sense, so any data can help us with our decisions. Now I’m back in Australia, and although we have more rolling hills than mountains, I still see so many opportunities to apply what we learned.

After meeting Andy, I’m keen to see if we can apply our science and engineering methods to topics slightly more mainstream. Can we use data science techniques to draw out interesting threads from current issues in politics, economics and society? I’ve always thought we don’t have enough spread across all these disciplines. Us analytic types tend to forget that there are people behind the numbers. And the people types, tend to forget to look to mathematics and statistics as one way of finding solutions to today’s problems.

Our project: data based visualisation of today’s issues

Here’s the plan. We want to apply data science and visualisation to topics of the day. We hope to improve, record and share our analytics and visualisations progress as we go.

How will we do it? We’ll see how this goes, but our original idea is to create one chart, plot or map per month. We will be on the lookout for interesting datasets, and we’ll try draw out some observations. Have a look (here) for examples of our visualisations of the month.

Please let us know if you have some interesting data. Or better yet, an interesting question!

Any topic works, so long as it is something in the public interest or focus.