Data Science Blog

Taking a Hackathon approach to exploring new methods in NLP

learning

NLP

AI

At the Strategy Unit, we’re lucky to have an awesome Evaluation team who often process and categorise large amounts of free text in the work that they do. This can be a…

Using GitHub Apps for Authentication

GitHub

learning

deployment

Recently, we’ve been working on building an internal dashboard to monitor the repositories in our GitHub organisation. The intention is to perform various checks, such as…

Mapping my R journey so far: ten things that I have done along the way

learning

This blog post follows up from a talk I gave last year at coffee and coding about my experiences of learning how to code using Rstudio. Here I build on that talk to share…

Introduction to text vectorization

NLP

Python

Tutorial

What is it and why do we care? First steps in Natural Language Processing

Deploy previews with GitHub pages

GitHub

learning

deployment

Wouldn’t it be nice if when a PR is created, you automatically got a deployed version of your changes to look at?

Using GitHub to plan and organise Coffee & Coding

GitHub

learning

Coffee & Coding is a fortnightly hour-long session organised by the Data Science team, open to all members of the Strategy Unit with an interest in coding. It’s been well…

Map and Nest

purrr

R

tutorial

I want to share a framework that I like using occasionally for data analysis. It’s the nest-and-map and it’s helped me countless times when I’m working with related…

Storing data safely

learning

R

Python

UPDATED: Please see the Addendum to this blog, added 2025-04-03 regarding accessing data from SharePoint

YiWen Hon, Matt Dray, Claire Welsh

One year of coffee & coding

learning

The data science team have been running coffee & coding sessions for just over a year now. When I joined that Strategy Unit, I was really pleased to see these sessions…

RStudio Tips and Tricks

learning

R

In a recent Coffee & Coding session we chatted about tips and tricks for RStudio, the popular and free Integrated Development Environment (IDE) that many Strategy Unit…

Visualising participant recruitment in R using Sankey plots

learning

tutorial

visualisation

R

Sankey diagrams are great tools to visualise flows through a system. They show connections between the steps of a process where the width of the arrows is proportional to…

Nearest neighbour imputation

learning

Recently I have been gathering data by GP practice, from a variety of different sources. The ultimate purpose of my project is to be able to report at an ICB/sub-ICB level¹.…

Jacqueline Grout

Advent of Code and Test Driven Development

learning

Advent of Code is an annual event, where daily coding puzzles are released from 1st – 24th December. We ran one of our fortnightly Coffee & Coding sessions introducing…

Alternative remote repositories

git

tutorial

It’s great when someone send’s you a pull request on GitHub to fix bugs or add new features to your project, but you probably always want to check the other persons work in…

Reinstalling R Packages

git

tutorial

R 4.3.0 was released last week. Anytime you update R you will probably find yourself in the position where no packages are installed. This is by design - the packages that…

Creating a hotfix with git

git

tutorial

I recently discovered a bug in a code-base which needed to be fixed and deployed back to production A.S.A.P., but since the last release the code has moved on significantly.…