Best Blogs for Data Miners and Data Scientists

By Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro, Apr 30, 2013.

I came across this Quora question
What are the best blogs for data miners & data scientists to read?

Good blogs are very interesting and useful, but also increasingly rare. There are statistics that indicate that blogging activity has declined recently, partly due to the rise of Twitter.

For example, I publish 3-4 items per day on KDnuggets News, but about 20 items/day on @kdnuggets Twitter - covering the latest in Big Data, Business Analytics, Data Mining, and Data Science.

The blogs mentioned on Quora include (in alphabetical order)

• FastML, covering practical applications of machine learning and data science
• Hilary Mason blog, from Bitly Chief Scientist, covering Data Science and Machine Learning on Big Data.
• Hunch.net, by John Langford, a leading applied machine learning researcher; His blog covers the intersection of theory and practice
• Kaggle blog no free hunch, covering Kaggle data science and machine learning competitions
• KDnuggets, news, jobs, software, events, and more in Data Mining and Data Science research and applications
• Normal Deviate by Larry Wasserman, CMU Prof. of Statistics and Machine Learning
• Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science by Andrew Gelman
• Three-Toed Sloth by Cosma Shalizi
• FiveThirtyEight Blog by Nate Silver, a very popular and non-technical blog covering analytics applied mainly to politics and sports
• Simply Statistics

As Editor of KDnuggets, I read a lot of other blogs and publications, and here are some of my favorites:

• Data Mining Research blog by Sandro Saitta
• Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization, and Social Media, by Matthew Hurst, a leading data scientist at Microsoft
• DecisionStats, by Ajay Ohri, covering business analytics and R, with practical examples, and interviews of field leaders
• Geeking with Greg , by Greg Linden, inventor of Amazon recommendation engine and internet enterpreneur
• IA Ventures blog, by one of the leading Big Data venture capitalists Roger Ehrenberg and his team
• Occam's Razor, by Avinash Kaushik, brilliant Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google
• R-bloggers , best blogs from the rich community of R, with code, examples, and visualizations
• Smart Data Collective, an aggregation of blogs from many interesting data science people
• Steve Miller blog, covering data science, statistics, R, and other topics at Information management.
• Tom H. C. Anderson blog, focusing on market research with data and text mining.
• Vincent Granville blog. Vincent, a founder of AnalyticBridge, regularly posts interesting topics on Data Science and Data Mining
• What's the Big Data, by Gil Press. Gil covers the Big Data space and also writes a column on Big Data and Business in Forbes.

Here is KDnuggets big list of Blogs and News on Big Data, Business Analytics, Data Mining, and Data Science

Comments from the Web

From Data Scientists LinkedIn group:

Mark Nickel : I am a regular reader of Ryan Swanstrom's blog: datascience101.wordpress.com/

Wilco van Ginkel
Good question, but I think that it really depends on what one is looking for/interested in.

I guess there are 'generic' data mining & science blogs (i.e., those blogs discuss data mining & science in more general terms, not so much focussd on one specific topic within data mining & science) and the 'specialized' blogs, related to a specific topic, going more in-depth (e.g., R-bloggers).

I looked at your list and it is impressive enough as it is, I reckon. I would certainly add the blog of Cathy O'Neil (also called mathbabe) at mathbabe.org. As well as the twitter handle of DJPatil (@djpatil). He doesn't always tweet about data science, but the ones he does are an interesting read.

Good luck with following up all these blogs! :)

What other Data Mining / Data Science blogs you like to read? Please comment.