Data Analyst
Apparently the Drunkard’s Walk, “falls into the general category of Stochastic Processes, specifically a type of Random Walk called a Markov Chain.“. That all sounds very complicated, so I’ll simulate it with an Excel Data Table. A drunk person starts at home at co-ordinates (0,0), and goes for a wander. For each step he takes,…
My generic Chinese fitness watch measures my heart rate and sleep patterns 24/7. It has an associated app which displays very high level summary information on my phone via an associated app. The watch does however send all the data it has collected in a very non-standard file format every day via Bluetooth to my…
In my post http://www.neilmcniven.co.uk/european-roulette-simulation/, I looked into the amount of money you could expect to win or lose with a given bankroll and number of spins at European roulette. Here instead I will look at the number of spins of the wheel you can expect to survive before your bankroll is down to zero –…
Recently many politicians and other people have been claiming that Sweden’s death rate was unaffected by Coronavirus despite their controversial decision to keep restrictions looser than almost anywhere in the world while chasing herd immunity. Statistics Sweden (scb.se) have freely downloadable and comprehensive datasets on a wide range of national statistics. Included are data on…
I have a lot of experience using Excel for data processing and visualisation, but until today I had never used Microsoft’s business analytics tool, Power BI (Business Intelligence). Power BI Desktop can be downloaded here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/get-started/ and used (with some restrictions) free of charge. To try it out, I started off by importing my 2020…
In European Roulette there are 37 pockets in the wheel numbered from 0 to 36 inclusive – 18 black, 18 red, and 1 green. There are many possible bets that can be placed in the game of roulette. One of the simplest is just to bet on the ball finishing in the pocket of specific…
Below is a chart to showing the percentage of positive Covid-19 tests in the UK each day for 1st October 2020 to 17th January 2021. The red trend line shows the 7 day rolling average test positivity rate. The first downward slope shows the effect of the second national lockdown, followed by a steep peak…
Stephen Wolfram is famous for many reasons. One of those reasons are his Wolfram Rules looking at cellular automata. One dimensional cellular automata are defined by very simple rules. Each cell is given a value of 1 or 0 depending on the values contained by the three neighbouring cells above (the cell directly above, the…
The Game of Life rules are very simple. You start with a randomly generated grid of cells (some ‘[a]live’ and some ‘dead’).What happens next is decided by the following rules:* Any live cell with two or three live neighbours survives.* Any dead cell with three live neighbours becomes a live cell.* All other live cells…
Below is my running record for the year 2020. Click on the larger chart images to better see the details. Dates in red are Sundays. Walks is the number of walking breaks taken during the run. All times in minutes are given as decimals – e.g. 60.75 minutes would be 60 mins 45 seconds. mins/mile…