The 2014 election gave rise to an even more fragmented lower house in Brazil, suggesting the political system is less stable than expected. The 2014 legislative election The election this year gave rise to an even more fragmented lower house. Th...
The 2014 election gave rise to an even more fragmented lower house in Brazil, suggesting the political system is less stable than expected. The 2014 legislative election The election this year gave rise to an even more fragmented lower house. Th...
When you apply machine learning algorithms on a regular basis, on a wide variety of data sets, you find that certain data issues come up again and again: Missing values (NA or blanks) Problematic numerical values (Inf, NaN, sentinel values like 999999999 or -1) Valid categorical levels that don’t appear in the training data (especially … Continue reading Vtreat: designing a package for variable treatment → Related posts: R minitip:…
Parallel computing is incredibly useful, but not every thing worths distribute across as many cores as possible. Roughly a year ago I published an article about parallel computing in R here, in which I compared computation performance among 4 pack...
One of the attractive aspects of logistic regression models (and linear models in general) is their compactness: the size of the model grows in the number of coefficients, not in the size of the training data. With R, though, glm models are not so concise; we noticed this to our dismay when we tried to […] Related posts: Generalized linear models for predicting rates Bad Bayes: an example of why…
R is definitely our first choice go-to analysis system. In our opinion you really shouldn’t use something else until you have an articulated reason (be it a need for larger data scale, different programming language, better data source integration, or something else). The advantages of R are numerous: Single integrated work environment. Powerful unified scripting/programming […] Related posts: R minitip: don’t use data.matrix when you mean model.matrix Survive R Why…
7 R Quirks That Will Drive You Nutty StumpedEvery language has its idiosyncrasies. Some “designer”“ type languages have less due to extreme thoughtfulness of language engineers. I suspect Julia for example has many less quirks. However, despite its quirkiness R has become an amazingly flexible resource for a diverse range of tasks with thousands of packages and over 100,000 available commands (Rdocumentation.org) in subject matter as diverse as Pharmacokinetics, to…
Visualization is a useful tool for data exploration and statistical analysis, and it’s an important method for communicating your discoveries to others. While those two uses of visualization are related, they aren’t identical. One of the reasons that I like ggplot so much is that it excels at layering together multiple views and summaries of […] Related posts: Revisiting Cleveland’s The Elements of Graphing Data in ggplot2 My Favorite Graphs…
You might remember my post on Twitter mentions in New York Times articles from a few months back. I simply accessed the NYT API and plotted a graph showing the rise in mentions over the past few years. At the time, I used R's very popular plotting libr...
This week I read the book by Michael Chernick and Robert LaBudde, An Introduction to Bootstrap Methods with Applications to R. It’s an interesting oeuvre for useRs of all stripes. I strongly recommend check it out. The book brings lots of examples ...
It's finally come to this - the last installment of the ground breaking, epic and superlative book review. Let's jump right into it! The last three chapters of the book, which I will briefly touch upon, deal with performance enhancement, which is an im...
