Weekly Project Post — Week 3

Hi to everyone in CSPB 3112.

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For a quick refresher, my project is twofold. (A) I’m sooping up a my previous final project for CSPB 4502 - Data Mining which was all about using all the historical NFL data that exists to construct a predictive Python-coded “machine” that will spit out a prediction for how the remainder of any current player’s career will go. Very exciting fun project. (B) I’m also taking a number of past projects from school and my own hobby math research and polishing them and presenting them nicely on a new sparkling personal website

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Here’s what I worked on this week:

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(1) I began someplace fun. My final project for CSPB 2270 - Data Structures was I designed and built a Rapidly Exploring Random Tree. Very fun, weird little project. It’s very cool visually and is fairly eye-catching. I went back into this old project, found all the necessary files and refreshed myself on the code and how it works. And reviewed it to see what should be improved. There’s a small upgrade I want to make to let it be more user-friendly. And there’s a small bug in the code that shows up about 10% of the time that I never had time to diagnose and repair.

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(2) The main bulk of my job this summer will be working on a total rebuild of the NFL Predictive modelling machine. It currently spits out a prediction, but I want to do an extensive revision such that we can get a numerical quantitative score for how good a job it does predicting the future of players’s careers (by having it run on historical players whose remaining careers we already know the data from). I want to do a deep dive into when my machine works well, when it works poorly, and keep fixing it to be better and better to get a new “high score”. I’d like to get it as good as I possibly can.

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How to make it better is super project-specific and technical, and I don’t wanna overshare here, so I’ll just summarize by saying the new version is going to use a lot of tree-decisions, clustering, and machine learning. Lots to do! I started it all this week.

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(3) I chose a domain name for my professional portfolio — orionhaunstrup.com. Nice and simple. I spent a bunch of time deciding this (and asked a few more knowledgeable friends of mine for advice), and finally went out onto Wix . com and bought the domain name. I’m now all set to start building my website!