Data and Visualizations

Dashboards are a nice concise way to present a lot of data

I created the dashboard below using Tableau public and the kaggle credit card fraud transaction dataset. It mainly serves as a personal foray into teaching myself Tableau while visualizing the columns in the dataset I will engineer into features to teach a machine learning model to differentiate between legitimate and fraudulent transactions.

Interactive figures improve understanding of data

I personally like figures and animations because they have a nice finality about them when you're done working on them. Getting the right plot for your data can be the difference between having a visual conclusion that is captivating and a conclusion that has no momentum behind it.

The image above is an interactive plot of 420 open clusters plotted in their x, y, z positions with respect to the Milky Way Galaxy (our galactic home) center (this is known as Galacto-centric coordinates). This is one of my first plotly interactive plots but is still one of my favorite bc it showcases the star cluster environment around our solar system. Our sun is actually located in this plot around X = -8.5, Y = 0.0 and Z = 0.0. The plotted black lines are all simple line models of the Milky Way spiral arms with their names nearby. We are located in the 'Local' spiral arm, naturally lol.

Plotly is a python package that is useful for producing interactive, html-embeddable figures. I only plotted the mean positions of these star clusters because I do not own plotly enterprise edition and have a limit on plotted points, otherwise I could've plotted all the individual stars that make up these star clusters.

Animations help develop intuition about certain physical concepts

This gif is a nice foray into trying to animate the motions of two very real stars in their binary star orbits (a binary star is just two stars rotating around each other). It was also an exercise figuring out how to minimize the outputted gif size to be quick-loading while still remaining visually appealing. This binary star was found to have an orbital period (the time it takes for one star to go around the other, like how Earth takes a year to orbit our Sun.) of only 0.6 days or about 14 hours. These two stars are swinging hard around each other!