More data science resources

3 min read

By massively popular request1, I’ve put together a list of data science related podcasts, groups and other resources that have been useful over the last couple of years. I last did something similar nearly 3 years ago.

Podcasts

I will categorise these into three groups: Slightly Technical, Wisdom Inducing, and Career Path Awareness. In decreasing order of how much I like them and how regularly I listen:

  1. Not So Standard Deviations: Wisdom Inducing, one of my favourites since 2017. On a recent episode they discussed a question I sent in about data science cultures.
  2. Naked Data Science: Wisdom Inducing.
  3. Learning Bayesian Statistics: Career Path Awareness and sometimes Slightly Technical.
  4. Linear Digressions: Slightly Technical, they unfortunately stopped creating new episodes but the old ones are still good.
  5. QuantumBlack Voices: Career Path Awareness.
  6. Women in Data Science: Career Path Awareness.
  7. The Effective Statistician: Career Path Awareness, specifically around pharmaceutical statistics. I listened to several episodes and then decided not to go down that route at this stage.
  8. storytelling with data: Slightly Wisdom Inducing.

Meetups and groups

The allstat mailing list is a really good way to find out about statistical/academic talks, but it takes some patience to find something relevant. Alternatively you could use the archive2 to find groups to follow in the future.

In no particular order:

  1. Singapore AI meetup group: Not sure how I came across this group during the pandemic but I’ve watched a few talks online this year.
  2. Bayesian Mixer London: I went to a couple of their events before the pandemic and they were really nice. Once I even got a Stan sticker from Michael Betancourt.
  3. LondonR: I haven’t been to a physical event yet but I will be keeping an eye on them.
  4. London Python: I watched one online talk last year which was really nice considering I hadn’t started using Python yet.
  5. Warwick R user group: I used to go to their events regularly when I was at Warwick, and attended one online event last year.
  6. RSS West Midlands Local Group: The Royal Statistical Society has many local groups which have relatively infrequent events, and they are considerably more statistical and theoretical. There’s also an RSS YouTube channel which has many good talks recorded, if you look for them.

Twitter

You can see who I follow on my Twitter profile.

I lurk on Twitter for the discussions among experts and cool people across relevant fields. This includes data scientists and statisticians in various industries, academics, data visualisation people, software engineers, stats PhD students at interesting institutions, R people, a few business-oriented PM people, etc. Twitter can also be an addictive and unpleasant website which makes money off your attention, so I try to be very careful about who I follow and how long I spend there.

Talks and other videos

I’ve made a YouTube playlist which I intend to keep updating as I come across helpful videos. It mostly reflects the statistics and software engineering topics I was trying to learn about through my degree, dissertation and beyond.

  1. I’m kidding of course, this is mainly for Sam and future me.↩

  2. I once scraped the allstat archive to find trends in job postings, which is a topic for another post. Just putting this here in the hope that I will write that post before I die.↩

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Aranya Koshy
Data Scientist