Data Science for Social Good

Andrew Landgraf
September 9, 2014

What is DSSG?

Rayid Ghani

Matt Gee

Fellows

Everyone

Projects

CPS pec

nfp mem

Tools Used

Python
- iPython Notebook
- scikit-learn
- Pandas
R
- RStudio
- Shiny (with JavaScript)
Git/Github
SQL
Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Methods

Regression / Classification
- Random Forests!!!
- SVM
- Logistic Regression
Visualization
Several projects dealt with text
- Some NLP
- Harnessed Google and Wikipedia

Environment

Startup culture
Mob programming
Trying to be leaders in data science
Very open to feedback on ways to improve fellowship
Hackathon
Un-DSSG

Social Good

Projects

Detecting lead poisoning
Predicting students who will drop out
World Bank, City of Memphis, Mexico

Weekly Seminar

People running non-profits
Quantitative people in non-profits
Researchers in public policy, …

Networking

Bi-weekly happy hours
Hosted meetup groups

Communication

Weekly 5-minute updates
“Deep dives” a few times
Present at meetups
Year-end “Data Fair”
Session at KDD

What is Data Science? - Drew Conway

What is Data Science?

Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician.
— Josh Wills (@josh_wills) May 3, 2012

Predicting School Enrollment at Chicago Public Schools

CPS Team

cps

From This

This

To This

This

It's a Trend

DSSG
- DSSG Atlanta and possibly expanding
DataKind
Bayes Impact
Code for America, etc.