All posts tagged with 'analytics'
Return of the intern
A year on from my first data science internship at FreeAgent, I’m about to start my second one, and I’m getting ready for my second first day. It’s different this time though. Aside from the fact that I am now a fully fledged graduate (scary!), this internship is going to be based entirely within my living room, as the entire company is now working remotely. I have never worked remotely… Continue reading
What is a Business Intelligence Analyst?
The term Business Intelligence Analyst (or BI Analyst for short) can be a confusing one. Broadly speaking, the role of a BI Analyst can overlap with lots of other job titles that you might see out in the wild, such as: Data AnalystData ScientistInsight AnalystProduct AnalystMarketing AnalystCommercial AnalystReporting AnalystMI AnalystWeb AnalystCRM/Customer Analyst In general - and especially in the data world - job titles can often be inconsistent and subjective.… Continue reading
Deriving and verifying the uncertainty on conversion rate predictions
For the past few weeks I’ve been working on building a machine learning model that can estimate the probability that a customer will convert from the free trial to a paid subscriber. In practice, I combine the predictions from this model for cohorts of companies, which are defined by their acquisition channel and acquisition month, and so a method is required for calculating the conversion rate uncertainties for each cohort.… Continue reading
Being a Data Science Intern at FreeAgent: The first month
As the end of my second year at university was approaching I knew I needed to get some real-world experience to help me get a clearer vision of what career path I want to follow in the future. The best way of achieving this was getting a summer internship. After reading some blog posts of past Interns at FreeAgent (who knew I would be writing one myself a few months… Continue reading
Dealing with dirty data: useful functions for data cleaning in R
In this blog post, I’ll explain how to use some simple R-based data cleaning solutions (mostly in the ‘tidyverse’ package1) to address the most common dataset errors with the help of my favourite analogy: the untidy kitchen! NB: There are a plethora of valuable data cleaning tools in other software and even within R there are many different tools available. While the approach that I describe here is not necessarily… Continue reading
Clean house: clear mind. Clean data: clear findings.
Soon after settling in at FreeAgent and getting to grips with my role as a data science intern, I got the opportunity to present some of the data that I had been working on at a ‘town hall’, a company-wide weekly meeting where everyone gets together to present their work, share news and pitch ideas. The data I presented was attitudinal survey data from accountancy practices that had contracts with… Continue reading
Castles, canals and coffee: my first week as a FreeAgent data science intern
My regular job is as a PhD student specialising in veterinary biology but this summer I have an amazing opportunity to be a data science intern at FreeAgent. If you are wondering why a biologist came to work at an accountancy software company, this is because of the particular branch of biology that I study: ‘epidemiology’. An epidemiologist typically uses data to understand ‘the distribution and determinants of health-related states… Continue reading
Programming, Burgers, and Treasure: Summer with FreeAgent
This summer it has been my pleasure to join FreeAgent as a Data Engineering intern. Alongside the analytics and architecture teams, I have been working on a new exciting feature to complement the FreeAgent application. Programming mostly with Python, I have learned a great deal from my colleagues, and I wish to share the experience with you all here on the engineering blog. Since joining in early June, the intern… Continue reading
Querying the past
I’ve been learning to love the ActiveRecord query interface over the past few months. Whilst I find it infuriating when I’m battling it to do what I actually want, I also relish the power and convenience it gives me for many simple queries. So, when it came to designing a query language for historical data in our systems, ActiveRecord was a natural choice. We can now do queries like: FA::Subscriptions.… Continue reading
Being a data science intern
Fiona Christie joined us here at FreeAgent on a 3-month internship with our Data Science team this summer after completing an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Glasgow. She impressed us so much that we offered her a full-time role and we even managed to persuade her to write this post about her experience as an intern. Condensing my time at FreeAgent into one post hasn’t… Continue reading