Can Data Science Find Bigfoot?

Watching Bigfoot researchers chasing — sometimes quite literally — circumstantial evidence, noises, and half-glimpsed shadows through the forest at night certainly makes for some great TV.

I love killing time with a bit of TV, and a show called “Expedition Bigfoot” has kept me entertained on many a lunch break. However, this show isn’t the run-of the-mill cryptid documentary as it claims to use a “data algorithm” to first identify a target search zone before sending in human researchers to track down the hairy subject.

Obviously my ears pick up when I hear something like this, and short of packing an overnight bag, I start to wonder what I can do to help the search. So here we go, “helping”!

While this is going to be quite a lighthearted article, I’m going to take a look at some data, covering:

  1. Exploratory data analysis (EDA) with Pandas Profiling
  2. Exploratory data analysis the old-fashioned way
  3. Clustering with OPTICS

The data

The data comes from Timothy Renner¹, who in turn sourced the observations from the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization².

Visit Now