This document discusses choosing baby names and analyzing name trends and popularity over time. It notes a lack of diversity in popular names compared to rare names. It also provides an overview of the methodology used to analyze names which involves constructing a term-document matrix from name meanings and usages to determine similarity between names based on a query.

1. Everyone has a name, give your kid a great one!
Andrew W. Zirm
Insight Data Science
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2. Lack of Diversity
among popular names
Rare Popular
2
Number of Unique Names
2013
1980

3. Andreas,
Andreas,
Lilly

4. Andreas,
Andreas,
Lilly

5. Andreas,
Andreas,
Dylan
Walden
Kristoffer
Maxwell
Griffith
Blake
Henry
Dylan
Spencer
Jacob

6. Under the hood
‣ Used python/nltk to construct a term-document matrix from the
name meanings, usages and origins
‣ Each row represents a name (19k) and the columns are the top
5000 words and bi-grams
‣ For the keyword search, I generate a query vector by
incrementing the term count for the keywords and their
synonyms
‣ If a name is input, the query consists of that name’s row
‣ Finally, the output is a list of names sorted by cosine similarity
to the query vector
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7. Andrew
from the Greek, Andreas,
meaning “man”
Andreas,
Andreas,

8. Andrew
from the Greek, Andreas,
meaning “man”
Andreas,
Andreas,