Simon Carryer
Simon Carryer is a Data Scientist at Xero, in Wellington, where he works on teaching computers to do accounting. With a background in Social Sciences, he took a slightly circuitous route into data science. Previous to Xero, he worked for Trade Me, where he helped build their property price estimation models.
How do computers turn complicated, subjective information into usable data? In this talk I'll explain a technique called Latent Semantic Analysis. Using data from the Internet Movie Database, I'll show how we can transform text data into numeric representations that encode the meaning of text, and then demonstrate how we can use these numeric representations to learn things about the movies. This is a high-level overview that should be accessible for almost anyone, regardless of your background.