Help and Coaching

Excel_v1Excel_v1 Member Posts: 2 Newbie
edited November 2019 in Help
Hi. I am a first year computer science student at Ashesi University, Ghana. As part of our course work, we are to design solutions to problems of our choice. Ours was the lack of data implementation tools by the road development agencies and government. We chose to address it by building an app that enables the data analysts within these agencies to analyze data and build optimization models. And also use predictive analysis to predict any changes that might occur. Apart from the fact that we don't really have much ideas on how these things work, we also recognize that companies like yours are far ahead in this area. So we thought of creating an app that can integrate your apps into ours, create those models, and store them on a blockchain. Is this feasible? And some advice and coaching would help too. Also, please forgive me if I seem so amateurish.
Sincerely, Excel.




Answers

  • rfuentealbarfuentealba Moderator, RapidMiner Certified Analyst, Member, University Professor Posts: 568 Unicorn
    Hello Excel,

    How are you? I think the problem you are facing is a little too broad. Let's start with the basics and see how things go.

    The first thing I would do is to use a geographical database to map where are the people and where are the roads. A geographical database is normally PostgreSQL with PostGIS, with GIS being a Geographical Information System. It allows you to draw geometry points, lines and traces. There are plenty of GIS applications, but one I like a lot is qGIS.

    Once you get that done, you can use the SQL language inside PostgreSQL to define your goals: what do you want? I have a few goals in mind, but I don't know the reality of the situation.

    • Build as many roads as possible between cities with the least amount of money possible.
    • Build the roads that may give you the best return of investment given that two cities might have a synergy that can result in better production.
    • Keep track of what parts of a road require fixing to continue operations.
    • Keep track of what roads require investment in terms of services (gas stations, resting places, charging stations, police or rescue departments).
    • Keep track of traffic accidents and predict these based in days, road conditions, etc.
    For all these applications, you can use PostgreSQL with RapidMiner and a visualizer that would be the application you need to build. Normally I would expect this kind of application to be built on top of Leaflet, because it shows maps in a very nice way.

    Now... models are stored in objects, but blockchains don't have much to do with data science. A blockchain is the implementation of an algorithm named: "The byzantine general's problem". It has its base in a network of trust that makes it very difficult to change a message over a decentralized system. It has little to do with what you are expecting here. Go ahead and google about it.

    About the coaching: I think I speak for everyone here when I say that we would be glad to answer all the questions you need in terms of RapidMiner. Coaching, like doing personal work is something I like to do but have little time to :( therefore I encourage you to keep asking here, as many others will benefit from your findings too. ;-) This is the idea of a community.

    Please refer to the following links about the other applications I mentioned:

    Hope it helps,

    Rodrigo.
  • Excel_v1Excel_v1 Member Posts: 2 Newbie
    Thank you so much. I'm not very knowledgeable with SQL, but I'm willing to learn. It will only take time and consistency.
  • rfuentealbarfuentealba Moderator, RapidMiner Certified Analyst, Member, University Professor Posts: 568 Unicorn
    Hello @Excel_v1

    SQL as a language is pretty standard. There are plenty of tutorials and courses that will help you with SQL basics. Crash course in 1 post:

    Your data is organized in TABLES that you can CREATE, ALTER or DROP. That is called "Data Definition Language" and I wouldn't worry about it if I can install PgAdmin 4 to work with PostgreSQL.

    After you define the shape of your data in these tables, you can use SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE. That is called "Data Manipulation Language", and I would really worry about it, but again PgAdmin helps you with the first parts of it, you should then practice a lot.

    If you don't feel in the mood for something big like PostgreSQL, try your luck with SQLite to dominate SQL language, but keep in mind that SQLite doesn't have GIS capabilities.

    All the best,

    Rodrigo.
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