Can data science write the perfect Christmas song? In this video, we use real Spotify data, machine learning, and music analysis to uncover what actually makes a festive hit. From Lyrics and sentiment arcs to keys, BPM, and danceability, we build a model using TF-IDF and Elastic Net regression to find out what works and what definitely doesn’t.

Along the way, we battle the Spotify, API, analyse classics from Mariah Carey to Slade, and turn messy real world data into a statistically informed Christmas song… which we then actually write.

You’ve heard this argument a million times. Some people are like, “It’s set at Christmas, there are carols, of course it’s a Christmas movie.” Other people: “It’s just an action film with tinsel, calm down.” So instead of screaming on the internet for the rest of my life, I did the only sensible thing: I built a model.

In this video I’m going to show you how I trained a simple Christmas-movie classifier using soundtrack data and basic movie metadata, and then used it to settle the age-old internet debate so we never have to talk about it again. We’re literally going to turn the Die Hard argument into machine learning.

So, what was the actual goal here? I wasn’t trying to build the biggest, fanciest AI in the world. The question was much pettier than that: can I take the stuff people always bring up in the Die Hard argument and turn it into numbers, train a model on a bunch of movies, and ask it, “Okay, based on everything you’ve seen… what do you think about Die Hard?”

Santa is out of time. He's got 32 houses to hit in Springfield, a tight schedule as it is, and he's spent so long optimising his naughty list, he hasn't got a single minute left to calculate the best route. But never fear, not even we’re Evil enough to not help Santa. 

We’re going to use the Traveling Salesman problem to save the Simpsons’ Christmas before it becomes MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. 

Today we’re taking a look at three algorithms to save the magic of Christmas. Can any of them do it? Let’s find out. 

So there comes a time in every adult’s life where an annoying child asks how Santa could possibly visit every house out there. I’ve no idea why we don’t get given response scripts on our eighteenth birthday, but today I’m going to give you what you need to baffle the child so much that they never ask the question again. Bells ready to jingle? Here we go