Some (opinionated) themes and highlights from this year’s NIPS conference:
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the connection between prediction models and the decisions that they influence. There is a lot of theory around this, but communicating how the various pieces all fit together with the folks who will use and be impacted by these decisions can be challenging. One of the important conceptual pieces […]
I’ve had this book on pre-order since spring and it finally arrived on Friday. I subsequently devoured it over the weekend. The book lays out a clear and compelling case for how data-driven algorithms can become — in contrast to their promise of amoral objectivism — efficient means for reproducing and even exacerbating social inequalities […]
Another great turnout at the DataPhilly meetup last night. Was great to see all you random data nerds! Code snippets to generate animated examples here.
The next DataPhilly meetup will feature a medley of machine-learning talks, including an Intro to ML from yours truly. Check out the speakers list and be sure to RSVP. Hope to see you there! Thursday, February 18, 2016 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM Speakers: Corey Chivers Randy Olson Austin Rochford Corey Chivers (Penn Medicine) Abstract: […]
The default plot method for dataframes in R is to show each numeric variable in a pair-wise scatter plot. I find this to be a really useful first look at a dataset, both to see correlations and joint distributions between variables, but also to quickly diagnose potential strangeness like bands of repeating values or outliers. […]
Over the years of my graduate studies I made a lot of plots. I mean tonnes. To get an extremely conservative estimate I grep’ed for every instance of “plot\(” in all of the many R scripts I wrote over the past five years. The actual number is very likely orders of magnitude larger as 1) many […]
Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Marianne Corvellec from Plotly. This post is based on an interactive Notebook (click to view) she presented at the R User Conference on July 1st, 2014. Plotly is a platform for making, editing, and sharing graphs. If you are used to making plots with ggplot2, you can […]
Guest post by Matt Sundquist of plot.ly. Plotly is a social graphing and analytics platform. Plotly’s R library lets you make and share publication-quality graphs online. Your work belongs to you, you control privacy and sharing, and public use is free (like GitHub). We are in beta, and would love your feedback, thoughts, and advice. […]
A friend of mine just alerted me to a story on NPR describing a prize on offer from Warren Buffett and Quicken Loans. The prize is a billion dollars (1B USD) for correctly predicting all 63 games in the men’s Division I college basketball tournament this March. The facebook page announcing the contest puts the odds at 1:9,223,372,036,854,775,808, […]
