Chris Samson
Data Scientist
Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment
Chris is a Data Scientist with the Risk Analytics and Data Science team at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). Coming from an academic background he has leveraged R and Shiny to solve a variety of statistical, analytics, and data science problems. Chris is passionate about democratising data and data science, with the aim to set the whole team up for long-term success.
The magic of network graphs: how R Shiny enables exploration of complex networks
Most businesses and government departments deal with data representing links between entities. These can range from applications or purchases associated with customers, relationships between individuals and/or employers, or even attributes shared between entities. This data is typically stored in relational tables, where relationship queries require painful SQL joins or cross-lookups, which are practically limited to only few degrees of separation and require high technical ability to retrieve. Network Analytics is a modelling technique that allows to easily visualize and explore entities and relationships between them by users of all skill levels. Network Analytics is often used for data problems which involve many-to-many relations such as discovering hidden connections, identifying key entities, navigating deep hierarchies, detecting communities and predicting links. In this talk we will showcase how R Shiny, igraph, and visNetwork can be used to develop a Network Analytics app for live exploration of knowledge graphs. We will share some challenges and lessons learned from our journey, including how to maximise use cases and options for deployment to users.