Bio

Yifei Xiao is a master’s student majoring in computer science at The Pennsylvania State University. He also graduated from Penn State with honor and distinction with a degree in Computational Mathematics. His research interests include computer networking, website development and computer security. Currently he is working on using smart devices to help people detect sleep symptoms and improve sleep quality.

Computational Essay: Coca Cola Vs. Pepsi

Project: Convert Dataset to Wolfram Language

Goal

Data analysis is a process of inspecting and transforming raw data with the goal of discovering useful information and supporting decision making. Processing huge amounts of data usually needs a lot of time, and it is hard to get useful information from plain text. This project introduces a way to convert plain text from a CSV file to Wolfram Language–computable expressions.

Summary of Results

By using the user-created function convertData, users can import any CSV file and convert it to its Wolfram Language representation. This function is able to handle a large dataset that contains millions of cells, and at the same time, it provides several options to speed it up and help users to convert particular types of data.

Future Work

In the future, convertData should interpret more data types, such as currency, addresses, etc. It should also have a more accurate type inference, especially on numerical data.