Do I Have To Teach?

Jonathan Adams

June 27th, 2018

What Can You Become?

  • Teacher
  • Doctor or Lawyer
  • Analyst or Statistician
    • Use logic and problem-solving skills
    • Explore data
    • Build models
    • Make inferences
    • Find optimizations
    • Requires creativity

Data Analyst/Statistician

  • Data Mining
    • Make inferences from sets of data
      • Forecast likely events
      • Identify patterns
      • Identify areas to be changed
    • Examples
      • Target predicting if a woman is pregnant
      • Google predicting the severity of flu season
  • Event Classification
    • Something bad is happening. Is it an accident or is there a more serious problem?
      • Hypothesis test and probability
    • Determine results from samples, surveys, and tests
    • Given existing experience, can we classify future events?

Clustering

Centroids of set of fields
  • Clustering is a form of classification
  • Group the data by minimizing some dissimilarity measure and assume data within group have same classification
  • K-means is popular unsupervised clustering algorithm
  • Requires two inputs: desired number of clusters $k$ and initial cluster centroids
Example of k-means clustering
Centroids colored by cluster
    Can anyone catch the "error" in using this method?
Classification
Sample precision ag heatmap showing soybean yield
Simulated heatmap of field with irrigation pivot
Simulated heatmap with no sign of irrigation
  • How might we go about solving this?
  • What makes the irrigated different from the non-irrigated?
  • How is a field typically planted?
  • If the path goes back-and-forth, what might we expect?
  • Could we not view the path as a time series?
Example of irrigated time series data
Example of non-irrigated time series data
Histogram of test statistics

Conclusion

  • There are many jobs out there other than teaching
  • People will pay you to solve problems all day
  • A degree in math is only a toolset, you will have to get creative with it
  • Never say no to a request
  • Knowing a progamming language is vital!!!
    • Python
    • R
    • SQL
  • Google and StackOverflow are your friends!

Questions?