Related Links
FiveThirtyEight (538)
“Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight uses statistical analysis—hard numbers—to tell compelling stories about elections, politics, sport, science, economics, and more.”
FiveThirtyEight (538) is the brainchild of Nate Silver, a statistician specializing in baseball and elections, and posts some interesting mathematically-based articles about culture. I’m personally a fan of their NBA articles, and I recommend the daily newsletter Significant Digits (but not the weekly newsletter).
Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t also comes highly recommended.
Google News for Data Science
A good aggregate for recent data science articles.
/r/DataScience
Similar to Google News: a good aggregate for recent data science articles, but with crowdsourced voting and a thriving community that often provides insightful commentary about the articles posted.
Spotify Insights
Spotify Insights is a blog where Spotify’s data scientists write about interesting phenomena they encounter in their quest to make Spotify more accurate in music curation and discovery.
Some blog posts to get started: Data Reveals Podcasts Are Workday-Friendly, How Students Listen 2017, Iconic Playlists: What Emoji Say About Music, and Data Reveals The Most-Covered Christmas Songs.
Basketball-Reference
Basketball-Reference, or BBRef as it’s more casually known, is a database of “statistics, scores, and history for the NBA, ABA, WNBA, and top European competition” and provides great datasets for anyone interested in becoming a data scientist themselves. I’d also recommend checking out /r/nba, where you can find pretty interesting blog posts about player statistics, often using BBRef for raw data.
Facebook Data Science Research
“Data scientists at Facebook conduct large-scale, global, quantitative research to gain deeper insights into how people interact with each other and the world around them.”
Facebook as a platform requires deep and intuitive sociological insights into human interaction, and with the treasure trove of user data that Facebook’s data scientists and research have access to, this blog often posts fascinating blog posts such as how social ties influence hurricane evacuation behavior.
Freakonomics
A website with fairly accessible, humorous, and intellectually stimulating posts on statistics-related subjects.
Kaggle and No Free Hunch
Kaggle is an online community of data scientists, where users can find and publish data sets, explore others’ works, and host data science competitions.
No Free Hunch is Kaggle’s official blog and often posts about Kaggle data sets or recent Kaggle developments. For an example blog posts, see Designing a Self-Learning Tic-Tac-Toe Player and Impact of Game of Thrones on US Baby Names.
Data Science for Social Good
The authors have extensive industry experience that make them highly qualified to write about data science and it’s not as technically-focused as other data science blogs and uses real case studies to make their work very accessible to the general public.