Scraping together a dataset to predict Oscar winners

Pizza sponsored by DataXu (http://dataxu.com), drinks afterward by MassChallenge (http://masschallenge.org/).

Deborah Hanus, How to scrape together a dataset using things you found on the internet.

Using Jupyter notebooks and scikit-learn, I’ll predict whether a movie is likely to win an Oscar or be a box office hit. I’ll walk through the most important steps of creating an effective dataset using information that you find on the Internet: asking a question your data can answer, writing a web scraper, and answering those questions using nothing but Python libraries and data from the Internet. To illustrate how these steps fit together, I walk through building a dataset from IMDB data and use it to predict what makes a winning Oscar movie.

Plus a few lightning talks

Pizza will be provided by DataXu.

Mass Challenge is hosting drinks after the Meetup, so plan to stick around and say hello:

"MassChallenge is the most startup-friendly accelerator on the planet. No equity and not-for-profit, we are obsessed with helping entrepreneurs across any industry. We also reward the highest-impact startups through a competition to win a portion of several million dollars in equity-free cash awards. Through our global network of accelerators in Boston, London, Jerusalem, Lausanne and Mexico City and unrivaled access to our corporate partners, we can have a massive impact - driving growth and creating value the world over.

"We are expanding the use of our Accelerate Platform within our international programs and plan to make it available to a broader community of organizations with similar needs. Currently the platform is a single Python Django web application that focuses on individual accelerator competitions. To achieve MassChallenge's ambitious goals we need to re-architect the existing system and create entirely new web-services that will provide needed functionality at the increasing scale of the organization. We are looking for an experienced Principal Software Engineer to join our team and help us catalyze a global startup renaissance that embraces diversity, creates real value, and takes on the world's biggest problems."