Friday Update - June 10th, 2022
It's one small step for Alphacast, one giant leap for data
Hello, everyone! It's been a couple of weeks since our last update. We have been doing a lot of work under the hood, particularly trying to improve the readiness of the data on the platform, the overall performance of the Notebooks, and the content you see when you interact with Alphacast (i.e. through emails, related datasets, etc).
However, there have been major additions to our pipeline engine. Enjoy X new step!
New Steps: FRED!
If you work with economic data you probably know FRED, the massive database created by the US Federal Reserve Bank of Saint Louis, that claims to have 816,000 US and international time series from 108 sources. You can now access all that data directly into Alphacast, using Alphacast pipelines. Learn more here.
New Steps: Wide to Long (melt), Long to Wide (unstack)
If you work with data you probably have come to the scenario where you have found the data you need but not in the shape that you need it. A typical example is when data that should be row values are columns or otherwise, a situation that cannot be solved by simply transposing the data. "Wide to Long" and "Long to Wide" steps are useful to solve this. Learn more here.
New Steps: Append
Append is used to combine datasets with the same structure one on top of the other. Say, for example, that you have data for different months or years in different datasets and you need to combine them into a single one.
Improved Steps: Regroup Entities and add new entities
The step that regroups entities now allows the addition of new entities to the datasets. This may sound too techie, but a big number of problems can now be solved with pipelines.
Let's say, for example, that you have the prices of Corn, Wheat, and Soybeans and you want to calculate the average price of Grains and Oilseed. If the category where an entity you can use "Regroup entity" as usual, remove the "commodity" entity and calculate the average. But now let's assume that the category information is currently not on your dataset but on another dataset. In this case, you have to merge it to combine both datasets BUT if you do so, the category will not be an entity. Voila! With this step, you can now add the entity and regroup it!
New Steps: Reorder Columns and Sort Rows
Pretty straightforward. You can now change the column orders and sort the values of the rows.
Have a nice weekend!
