My name is Junaid. I’m a Data Scientist in London. I hold a MSc in Statistics with a specialisation in computational data analytics from Birkbeck College. My primary interest is in the application of probability and statistics to real world problems. I’m an advocate for statistical solutions which fit the problem and are not gratuitously complex. My area of focus is computational statistics and learning algorithms and I approach the subject from a theoretical as opposed to a “hacker” perspective, it’s important to me to break the black box as often as I can. I believe both the mathematicians and the hackers’ approaches are necessary to be a good data scientist; in my experience to really grasp an idea you need a clear understanding of basic theory but then the idea becomes concrete when you build as many models as you can and see how they do (and often don’t) work. Failure has been my number one teacher here.
My passion is to research and investigate as much as I can about statistics and to write up the research in a way that one would present mathematical material in a lecture. This means my focus is very bottom up and systematic – all this is needed for rigour and clarity. This blog is an effort to chronicle my investigations so that I can go back to the posts and refresh my mind on certain topics. In addition to this I will try to include applications of statistics to data problems in R. I’m an R fanboy and will always be happy to share code or accept a better way to do things.
When possible I will also try to include reviews on books I have read so that anyone passing by might be helped – I know from personal experience that an informative review is of high value given there are so many great books out there. Most of the best books I have read have been due to an informative review or a recommendation – I’d like to pay that forward.
In my serene/ spooky moments I like to reflect on the philosophy of science. I daresay that I follow that thread to the dungeon of metaphysics sometimes. I will chronicle these ideas here as a log to see how my views evolve over time.
Finally, a thank you to anyone who will ever read this blog. There are a lot of great blogs out there and all of them are better and more interesting than mine, so if anyone ever feels bored wants to talk with someone almost certainly less clever than them then I am happy to discuss/ debate topics I write about. I have accepted that I will always be more wrong than right – the process of discovery and improvement is what edifies me the most.