March 12, 2025

Predicting Credit Card Sales: A Comprehensive Guide to Quarterly Forecasting

Understanding the Key Components of Credit Card Sales Time Series

Credit card sales data typically exhibits several important patterns that must be accounted for in your forecasting model:

Trend Component: The long-term direction of sales (growth or decline)
Seasonal Components:
- Weekly Seasonality: Different spending patterns by day of week
- Monthly Seasonality: Monthly payment cycles and salary effects
- Quarterly Seasonality: Business cycles and quarterly reporting effects
- Annual Seasonality: Yearly patterns like holiday shopping seasons
Holiday Effects: Specific spikes or drops around holidays
Special Events: Sales, promotions, or other company-specific events

Data Preparation and Exploration

Before building your model, you should:

March 11, 2025

Automatically Load Code in Jupyter Notebooks Using the IPython Startup Folder

If you frequently work with Jupyter notebooks, you’ve probably found yourself writing the same import statements, utility functions, or configuration settings at the beginning of each notebook. This repetitive task can be eliminated by taking advantage of IPython’s startup folder functionality, which allows you to automatically load code every time you start a new notebook.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to set up and use the IPython startup folder in both Windows and Unix-based systems (macOS/Linux).

March 11, 2025

Using DuckDB for ETL: A Guide for Jupyter Notebook and Python Scripts

Introduction to DuckDB

DuckDB has emerged as a game-changer in the data processing landscape. It’s an in-process SQL OLAP database management system, similar to SQLite but optimized for analytical queries rather than transactional workloads. What makes DuckDB particularly attractive is its remarkable performance for data analysis tasks combined with its simplicity - no server setup, no complex configuration, just a library you can import into your Python scripts or notebooks.

March 11, 2024

Exploring diffusion-self-distillation: A Comprehensive Review

Introduction to Diffusion Self-Distillation

The GitHub repository diffusion-self-distillation by primecai presents a groundbreaking approach in the field of image generation, specifically focusing on zero-shot customized image generation. This project is an official implementation of the paper “Diffusion Self-Distillation for Zero-Shot Customized Image Generation” intended for presentation at CVPR 2025. The repository, though currently under construction, promises significant advancements in subject-preserving generation and relighting models.

Overview of Key Features

At its core, this project leverages a pre-trained text-to-image diffusion model to generate its own dataset for text-conditioned image-to-image tasks, thereby overcoming the limitation of insufficient high-quality paired data. The method, termed Diffusion Self-Distillation, involves several key steps:

October 31, 2023

Automating Git Repository Updates and Crontab Synchronization in Unix

Introduction

Managing a Git repository and syncing Crontab files across multiple Unix machines can be tedious if done manually. Automating these tasks using shell scripts can save time and reduce the chance of errors. This article will guide you through writing a script that performs the following tasks:

Update a Git Repository: Pulls the latest changes from a remote Git repository to your local machine.
Grab the Crontab File: Copies the Crontab file from the repository to the local machine.
Update Crontab: Applies the new Crontab settings.

Prerequisites

Unix-based System: This guide assumes you’re using a Unix-based system like Linux or macOS.
Git Installed: Git must be installed on your machine.
Cron Service: The cron service should be enabled.

Updating Git Repository

Step 1: Navigate to Git Repository

Navigate to the directory where your Git repository is located.

October 25, 2023

PiHole: A Shield Against Unwanted Advertisements

Pi-hole is a network-wide ad blocker that acts as a DNS sinkhole, and its main function is to protect devices within a network from unwanted content like advertisements without necessitating any client-side software installations. By intercepting DNS requests, Pi-hole prevents unwanted content from being loaded, thus creating a cleaner browsing experience across your network. The setup is straightforward, with a versatile installer guiding you through the process that takes less than ten minutes. Moreover, Pi-hole’s effectiveness extends beyond browser-based ads to other areas such as ad-laden mobile apps and smart TVs, providing a more comprehensive shield against intrusive advertisements (Pi-hole documentation)(Pi-hole Network-wide Ad Blocking).

October 24, 2023

Controlling a Sphero Mini with Python and spherov2

If you’ve ever wanted to control a Sphero Mini robot using Python, you’re in the right place. In this article, we’ll explore how to use the spherov2 Python package to interact with a Sphero Mini. We’ll focus on a specific example script, controls.py, which demonstrates how to control the robot’s movements and LED lights.

What is Sphero Mini?

Sphero Mini is a small, spherical robot that can roll around, change colors, and be programmed to perform various tasks. It’s a fantastic educational tool for learning about robotics and programming.

October 23, 2023

Comparing Databricks and Snowflake: Costs, Features, and Integration

Databricks vs. Snowflake

Databricks is a cloud-based data and AI platform designed to accelerate the performance and functionality of ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines across various industries. It provides data management, security, and governance capabilities, making it suitable for a range of data-centric tasks. On the other hand, Snowflake is software that provides users with a data lake and warehousing environment for data processing, unification, and transformation, aiming to simplify complex data pipelines and enhance data integration with other tools for greater functionality (TechRepublic).

April 9, 2023

Converting TS Video to MP4 using FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a powerful, open-source, and widely-used multimedia framework that can handle a wide variety of audio and video formats. In this guide, we will focus on how to use FFmpeg to convert a video file in the Transport Stream (TS) format to the more common MP4 format.

The command we will be using for this conversion is:

1

ffmpeg -i input.ts -c:v libx264 -c:a copy output.mp4

When to Use This Command

You might need to convert a video file from the TS format to the MP4 format in the following scenarios:

March 11, 2023

Interactive Data Tables in Python Using itables

When working with data in Python, displaying your dataframes in an interactive, user-friendly way can dramatically improve your analysis workflow. While pandas provides great functionality for data manipulation, its default display options are static and limited. This is where the itables library shines - it transforms your pandas DataFrames into fully interactive tables with sorting, filtering, and searching capabilities.

In this guide, we’ll explore how to use itables in Python, from basic installation to advanced customization.