In our first project for the online Data Science program, we were asked to predict home values based on 21 features from a dataset provided to us. Armed with my initial skills learned in the first module, I anxiously downloaded the dataset. I began exploring the data – I noticed that some of the data was categorized as objects, some integers, some floats… All features ended up being numeric! Sweet. This will be easy to analyze. Until I realized not all numbers are created equal.
Why leave the comfort of what you know and jump wholeheartedly into the realm of that awkward, unstable feeling of learning something entirely new?