There are two great news regarding my own professional qualifications: In May 2021, I both received the Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) in Machine Learning and passed the exam for the Certified Associate in Python Programming (PCAP).
Between August 2020 and January 2021, I took the course CAS Machine Learning at the Fernfachhochschule Schweiz (FFHS), the only university of applied sciences in Switzerland that offers a study concept that is largely remote-based. In order to achieve the credits, a term paper had to be written. My thesis was titled “Verspätungsprognosen für ÖV-Haltestellen” (“Delay Predictions for Public Transport Stations”) and mainly consisted of preparing historic and actual trip data from the Open Data Platform Mobility Switzerland for further analysis.
Each of the roughly 140 public transport companies in Switzerland publishes its trip data on a daily basis. This data always consists of timetable data, but large companies also provide actual data, i.e., every trip between two stations is listed with its real departure and arrival time, often with accuracy to the second. Every day, about 1.5 million data points are added to this publicly available dataset. For the 2020 period, this totaled 574 million data points at 130 GB. In my thesis, I did all necessary data cleaning and preparation so that even the largest transport companies’ data fits into working memory. I then applied several machine learning models onto this data in order to find out if delay predictions can be made with better accuracy than the median departure and arrival delays (which are all between 0:40 min and 1:30 min for the 15 largest public transport companies in Switzerland).
In May 2021, I also took the PCAP-31-03 examination and passed it with exceptionally good results. By achieving the Certified Associate in Python Programming (PCAP), I am now a holder of the highest Python certification that is currently available from the OpenEDG Python Institute. Please feel free to see my certificate and my badge. There are two more exams to come, but as of May 2021, I was told that the other two exams are not ready yet. However, you can be sure that I will keep myself updated and work on achieving them.
Shortlink to this blog post: link.simplexacode.ch/xa7d2021.07