This week, Hussein Seblani Aabou Raya talks about his experience as a Data Science Bootcamper, discussing the challenges with real-life data and his newly-encountered excitement for Data Storytelling.

I am Hussein, Venezuelan/Lebanese born in Saudi Arabia. I studied a Bachelor in Banking & Finance and I was working in Business Development projects for diverse industries in Lebanon and Venezuela. However, I felt the urge to study Data Science, so I can keep up with the Age of Big Data and Machine Learning.

We are witnessing a shift in the market from mass marketing to 1-to-1 marketing, providing a personalized consumer experience and better personalized interactions that can unlock new revenue streams and facilitate a more surgical approach to marketing and merchandizing.

Last week, I developed additional skills in R: coding the Naive Bayes classification method, using caret and h2o for detecting patterns in behavior and training the model to making predictions of future behavior!

We also created a model to analyze Twitter and social media comments to give us in depth insights to people thoughts, drives and motivations.

In python, we continued immersing ourselves this week with further machine learning modules, with Supervised learning  and coding models using classification trees, linear regression, logistic regression; we stared with Unsupervised learning such as Clustering using the models like k-means, k-medians, hierarchical clustering  and ended the week with Association rules using the priori algorithm to make a detailed analysis on receipt sales, detecting trends and patterns in consumer behavior.

Our professors are challenging us with real life data that is helping us in creating models and solutions for customer retention, fraud detection, image classification, market forecasting, churn prediction, customer segmentation, structure discovery, big data visualization and targeted marketing.

Communication and Data Storytelling has become my new favorite class after been motivated by the excitement and the passion of our instructor. It is also exciting to have all the corporate insights in project management, visualization and presentation that enable us to shine on stage and on every platform!

To add to the excitement of the week Mariana Santos, Founder and CEO at Chicas Poderosas visited us and moved the whole class with her charitable and empowering movement in data visualization as tool to reflect the pains and struggles of the societies around the world!

While on Thursday Sergio González, Lead Cloud Architect at Microsoft shared an Overview landscape of the latest technologies that are being developed and the tools of the future that are now in our hands.

Finally, I ended this week with my group working on the Iberia Capstone project, making our market research and company analysis, while developing models to best describe the data that would answer our golden question:

What is creating customer churn, and how to predict the behavior so we can make targeted solutions to prevent churn?

Interested in learning more about data science, machine learning in R & Python, and data storytelling? Click here for more information about our bootcamps! Also, don´t forget to discover the experience of other data science bootcampers!