I’ve recently built a little Python Flask API in an attempt to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and application deployment. My API (Yes! Click me! It works!) illustrates random forest trees using interactive D3.js objects and AJAX POST requests.

A live demo can be found on YouTube here that showcases interactions with the slider as well as collapsing and expanding the trees.

The random forest model came from a quick and dirty binary classifier that differentiates the Python versions - 2.7 or 3.x - of 14,000 Python questions scraped from Stack Overflow. The classifier has a petty area-under-curve (AUC) of roughly 69% on the hold-out set, but it serves the purpose of my first adventure into the frontend world.

While I am embracing the freedom of the open sourced world, my academic years gave me the good manners of research citation, so here is a list of people I am thankful for:

• Paul Burkard who walked me through Kyle Mix’s API template codes
• Andrew Blevins for patiently answering all of my questions - even the eccentric ones
• Mike Bostock and his amazing collapsible indented tree
• MasterMaps which is the company behind the d3 slider

My source code and README file are accessible here.