This page ranks trending Kenyan hashtags. The first table lists trending hashtags captured in the last 10 minutes; the table refreshes every 30 minutes. The second table lists trending hashtags captured in the past 6 hours; the table refreshes every 3 hours. Contact us if you are interested in more frequent data, or with questions about [...]
Twitter analytics is an integral part of leveraging social media today. Among certain demographics in Kenya, Twitter is by far the social media platform with the most interactions. Therefore, any company engaged in selling must realize that social media is an additional sales channel. Consequently, a well-devised marketing strategy will lead to a larger market footprint, higher [...]
Scaling Apache Spark is typically the last step before executing a Spark-dependent workflow. In previous articles, we introduced Spark, and showed how to optimize it. Once correctly optimized, scaling Apache Spark becomes trivial. To demonstrate, we return to the NYC taxi dataset originally described here. As of 2019, this dataset contains about 1.5 billion anonymized [...]
One often sees questions in forums asking why, for a particular Spark job, certain configurations outperform others. A naive understanding of Spark might imply that increasing the number of executors or increasing the cores per executor will lead to faster job completions. This is wrong. In this post, we show how to optimize Apache Spark. Faster execution [...]
Increasingly, data analysts turn to Apache Spark and Hadoop to take the "big" out of "big data." Typically, this entails partitioning a large dataset into multiple smaller datasets to allow parallel processing. In this previous post, we explained how distribution enables analysis of datasets that are too large to fit in memory on a single [...]
INTRODUCTION Algorithmic trading gives algorithms (computer programs) the discretion to make trading decisions regarding stock selection, order sizing and order placement. Any analytical technique used to drive trading strategies is a quantitative strategy, therefore algorithmic trading is a subset of quantitative trading. A main goal of algorithmic trading is to eliminate the human element from [...]
You are standing on the side of a steep mountain. You need to descend to the base of the mountain as quickly as possible. Remarkably, this scenario illustrates a central concept in machine learning. But let's get back to the mountain. I'd imagine that the first thing you would do, almost intuitively, would be to [...]
What is machine learning? I could bore you with textbook definitions. Instead, let me use a familiar example. A few days ago, I was teaching a child how to count. This is what transpired: Child: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 3, 8... Me: Stop. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is correct, but what comes after [...]
The masterfully scripted Ex-Machina is a slow-burning, cerebral thriller which subtly exposes moral and ethical questions surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI). Indeed, I am yet to watch a better movie on the subject. Ex-Machina (literally, "from the machine") revolves around three characters. First, we meet Caleb, an exceptional computer programmer. He works at Bluebook, a company [...]