Photo of me, Sarah Hamid, looking much professional

Sarah Hamid

My Unsolicited Words,
Thoughts, and Ideas

Making it to the Top 4% of a Kaggle leaderboard and why I shouldn't be there

If there is only one thing I learned by doing this, is that I really don't know very much. Now that I've gotten that off my chest, here are the methods, mistakes, and lessons I learned while attempting my first ML models in R.

Sarah Hamid

39-Minute Read

Making it to the Top 4% of a Kaggle leaderboard and why I shouldn't be there
Kaggle Titanic Competition using CART and CIT models

TLDR; I wanted to apply my beginner R skills to a complex problem, and chose machine learning because why not. I managed to do well, but my lack of knowledge blinded me to the fact that I was kinda cheating, as I relied heavily on trial and error to rise the ranks. Despite this, I learned a lot about classification models and random forests, wrote more complex R code that the beginner stuff I had done so far, and enjoyed messing around and reflecting on the experience. All in all, it’s still a…

Creating an interactive map in R for noobs like me

How I created a dynamic world map of the countries I lived in, visited, and traveled through using the R packages ggplot2 and ggirafe.

Sarah Hamid

6-Minute Read

Creating an interactive map in R for noobs like me
Interactive map using ggplot2 and ggirafe in R

I traveled a fair bit over the years, and have always been curious about just how much of the world I managed to cover. Well, what better way to illustrate my travels than to create an interactive map visualization in R.

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This is the little corner of the web that’s mine. One where I don’t need a style guide or stakeholder approval to hit publish.