When I graduated, one of my goals was to find a job related to my courses. After working as a statistician and data analyst for a while, my goal changed. I was more excited to develop my career, improve my skills, and keep my knowledge up-to-date. For the last few years, I have worked with different types of data, datasets, software, prediction problems, etc . During each project I learned a new way to clean, predict, forecast, enrich, and visualize data.
During one of my projects, I needed to find a way to classify our new customers according to their behavior. At first glance, this may seem simple, but there were multiple challenges. First, most of the explanatory variables were categorical and were missing information. Second, my dependant variable was nominal(categorical). Thirdly, none of numerical variables and errors had Gaussian distribution. Thus, the liner regression model wouldn’t be a good choice for prediction.
Indeed, I had to find a way to categorize all the customers, then to assign each new customer to the correct category, according to their features. In other words, I had to find a non-parametric model to categorize my new customers. This was completely different from anythingI had seen or worked on before.
Therefore, for solving this problem, I looked for a non-parametric method for classification and regression. After a lot of research, I decided to use the K-nearest neighbors’ algorithm to solve the problem. That was the first time, I was introduced to Machin Learning. This made me curious about ML and other algorithms and methods and I started researching to find more information. This research created a window that introduced me to the world of Data Science.
Last year, my life totally changed when my little sweet daughter was born. Since then, I have been completely busy with her. Every single day, I have been watching her grow and develop. As a full-time mom, life can be challenging and, I need to have something for myself, something to help me grow. This made me think about studying and expanding my knowledge. Reading about Data Science positions, learning about the need for it in near future, and considering my background in Statistics, I was encouraged to attend a Data Science course.
Based on my situation, I have found, the Flatiron School is the best option that would work for me.