As a Data Scientist (which I found out could mean so many things), I often wondered what sort of data do I want to work with next?
Big data? So in vogue but too vague.
Corporate data? Locked down with NDAs. (though I did some interesting ones recently)
Economic trends? Well that'd be interesting, working on it.
But I thought a lot about data containing information about human interactions, fornications, and the like. Of course, this was in part inspired by the fact that I was dumped for quitting grad school (being Dr. Wong was apparently important) to pursue data science. Perhaps I should work on data about people getting dumped. Nah, too depressing, and also hard to come by. When was the last time the population of dumpsville volunteering data on their heartaches?
So I decided to work on data that showed how people connect with each other romantically. Perhaps a dating site? Well, I contacted the fine ladies @ Coffee Meets Bagel and they were super excited for some data analytics on their core users, and since they have a graphics department that turns my numbers into info-graphics, it was a er... match made in heaven.
So here it is on Coffee Meets Bagel's blog.
I crawled through Coffee Meets Bagel's user interaction data base to assess popularity and pickiness among users. I then parsed their Facebook mentions of shopping brands to figure out the most popular 10 brands for men and women. It turns out popularity on the network varied with favoured brands (ie/ folks who wear certain brands or like certain brands are more liked). Interestingly both men and women like Victoria's Secret.
I'm looking forward to diving deeper into the Coffee Meets Bagel data set. It's absolutely loaded with possibilities. Stay tuned!