What an amazing week for me for Dear Data Two! The topic for week 6 physical contact and I've been learning Alteryx. The first thing I thought of was physical activity, not physical contact, so I emailed Jeffrey and asked him if he was ok with me taking such liberty on the topic. Fortunately Jeffrey was ok with my idea, but then I decided I could stick to the original contact by extending my thinking a bit.

I'm a huge quantified self data collector, which you'll likely see throughout my Dear Data Two work. I wanted to see how I could use Alteryx to help me get the data into Tableau for analysis before creating my analogue version because I feel like the best way to learn a new tool is to find a practical application. This is the first workflow I built on my own in Alteryx. It might not be the most elegant or most efficient, but I sure did learn a lot along the way. You can download this workflow here.


One of the things I have started to like the most about Alteryx is that I can push all of the complicated row level calculations that I used to do in Tableau to Alteryx, which in the end makes Tableau much faster. For example, I used to multi-row tool to calculate the distance between two geographic points recorded by my watch.

From there, I created the dashboard below to explore the data. In particular I wanted to view the maps and see the summary stats.  One thing I learned is that I need to figure out a way to account for times that I paused my watch; that data doesn't appear in the GPX files.



Exploring the data Tableau helped me quantify my runs for the week, but that didn't account for all of my physical activity for the week. To capture ALL of my activity:

1. I noted my total daily steps from Fitbit.
2. I calculated the number of steps for my runs by taking my stride rate of 184 strides per minute from TomTom and multiplying by the minutes I ran in Strava.
3. I subtracted my running steps from the total steps to get my walking steps.
4. I used the time of day that I ran and roughly calculated the proportion of walking steps before and after each run each day.

Do you remember that feeling you had when you first started using Tableau? It’s the eureka moment that gets you. I’m going through this exact same set of emotions right now…with Alteryx. And it started at Inspire15 in Boston. A conference that felt very, very similar to a Tableau conference, in terms of its content, energy and audience.

I first got a demo of Alteryx from George Mathew back in San Diego at TCC12. I was working for Facebook at the time, Mike Roberts from InterWorks set up the meeting, but I didn’t see a particularly good use case immediately for Facebook. Why? Facebook Data Engineers have always (and probably always will) code their own pipelines.

From here, I attended Predictive Analytics for Intermediate Users, which was basically a continuation of the first class. In this session, I learned how to use regression analysis to help predict potential response rates to targeted marketing campaigns. Tools used in the session included: Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, and Forrest Model.

Monday afternoon our team went on an amazing Segway tour of Boston.

Monday evening, Alteryx hosted a really nice welcome reception, including the Grand Prix, which our very own Craig Bloodworth qualified for. 

Dean Stoecker kicked off Tuesday with a great keynote about Analytics Independence. Alteryx does this kind of strange thing during their keynotes where they bring up customers for on stage interviews. I’m not sure why they do it. Personally, I found that they disrupted the flow of the keynotes and didn’t really add any value, but that’s my opinion.

I wanted to be sure to attend a few customer stories to get a better feel for how people are using Alteryx with the hope that it would give me some ideas on how I can use it. The first customer session I went to was by Sprint, and it was a stinker! The content was mediocre at best and the speakers were not very good. The second speaker stood at the front, faced his presentation with his back to the audience, and simply read the slides. It was THAT bad. Here are a couple of screenshots of their slides if you don’t believe me.

In the afternoon, I attended a great session by Ramnath Vaidyanathan, a Data Scientist at Alteryx, on the interactive visualizations for predictive analytics that were introduced in Alteryx 9.5.

Tuesday night was capped by an incredible party at The House of Blues with a Aerosmith tribute band “Draw the Line”. The band was incredible. It was clear the lead singer really wanted to be Steven Tyler, all the way down to the cosmetic surgery.

The final day of Inspire15 was kicked off with sensational keynote by George Mathew, in which he talked about the future of Alteryx and brought a developer on stage to demo the features coming in Alteryx 10.

I took one more training class in the late morning, Predictive Analytics for Advanced Users. My Inspire15 concluded with one of the best talks I’ve ever seen at any conference. The Information Lab’s Chris Love, Tim Ngwena and Craig Bloodworth gave an amazing talk they titled “From Data Hobbyist to the Boardroom”. It was chock full of great work that is reusable and applicable to everyone. Well done lads! You can watch the video of their talk below.