Articles by Ryan

Science… sort of DC Meetup 2014!

January 7, 2014 | Ryan

We’ve noticed through the magic of download statistics that we have a nice cluster of listeners in the DC metro area. With Patrick always nearby and Ryan in town for a bit, we figured a meet up would be fun. So on Thursday, January 9th, starting around 7:30pm EST ... [Read more...]

BEER REVIEW: End of the World Midnight Wheat

April 24, 2013 | Ryan

I promised in Episode 166 that I’d review this beer with a bit more detail than my usual quick spiel on the show, so allow me to present: End of the World Midnight Wheat! An ale brewed with “midnight wheat, chocolate malt, chili and spice” from Shock Top (aka Anheuser-Busch) ... [Read more...]

A Contest of the Flyer Variety

March 25, 2013 | Ryan

Guess what?! Charlie decided to institute another round of the epic Flyer Contest! Here’s how it works in 5 easy steps… Print out one of the two flyers below (or this link: here) Post it somewhere public. Examples include: a message board in your department, at your local comic shop, ... [Read more...]

Lies, Damned Lies, and Politicians

August 17, 2011 | Ryan

I like politics; I don’t like all of the lying involved.  If you ask me, I think that there should be “Ethics Committee” investigations into all of the lying.  Sure, tweeting a picture of your junk is probably not the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Slides from Rocky Mtn SABR Meeting

August 8, 2011 | Ryan

Last Saturday I had the good fortune to present a talk on finding, gathering, and analyzing some sports-related data on the web at the local SABR group meeting.  In case you’re not familiar with the “SABR” acronym, it stands for … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Google Trends, R, and the NFL

August 1, 2011 | Ryan

A week or so ago I saw a tweet related how the NFL lockout was affecting the search traffic for “fantasy football” on Google (using Google Trends).  Basically, the search traffic (properly normalized on Google Trends) was down prior to … Continue reading → [Read more...]

R and the Data Science Toolkit

May 2, 2011 | Ryan

I recently decided to present a talk to the Denver R Users Group (DRUG) on how to make an R package (May 17). There were only two problems: (1) I’ve never made a package and (2) I had nothing in mind … Continue reading → [Read more...]

NBA, Logistic Regression, and Mean Substitution

April 19, 2011 | Ryan

[Note: I wrote this on a flight and didn't proofread it at all. You've been warned of possibly incoherencies!] I’m currently sitting at about 32K feet above sea level on my way from Tampa International to DIA and my options … Continue reading → [Read more...]

NBA Analysis: Coming Soon!

March 21, 2011 | Ryan

I decided to spend a few hours this weekend writing the R code to scrape the individual statistics of NBA players (2010-11 only).  I originally planned to write up a few NBA-related analyses, but a friend was visiting from out … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Accessing R from Python using RPy2

October 24, 2010 | Ryan

This past Tuesday I had the opportunity to present a short talk (a bit long) related to text mining at the Los Angeles R Users’ Group. Since I do most of my text mining in Python, I took this opportunity to discuss RPy2, an interface to R from Python. My ... [Read more...]

Transactions, and Pondering their Use in Casinos

October 20, 2010 | Ryan

A couple of weeks ago, Bradford Cross of FlightCaster posted in Measuring Measures that transactions are the next big data category. I argue that they already are, and from reading his blog post, he seems to suggest this as well but I will admit that I think I missed his ...
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Introduction to statistical finance with R

October 19, 2010 | Ryan

During the first part of our meeting, Nicolas Christou gave an introduction of statistical finance in R, and presented a package he co-authored with previous PhD student David Diez (2010). Video of the talk is below: During the second part, … Continue reading →
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Lists of English Words

October 12, 2010 | Ryan

When I was a kid, I went through an 80s music phase…well, some things never change. “People just love to play with words…” Know that song? Anyway… One of the biggest pains of text mining and NLP is colloquialism — language that is only appropriate in casual language and not ...
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My Crappy Fantasy Football Draft

September 22, 2010 | Ryan

I compared the results of my fantasy football draft with the results of more than 1500 mock drafts at the Fantasy Football Calculator (FFC).  I looked at where player X was drafted in our league, subtracted off the average draft … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Using XML package vs. BeautifulSoup

August 31, 2010 | Ryan

A while back I posted something about scraping a webpage using the BeautifulSoup module in Python.  One of the comments to that post was by Larry — a blogger over at IEORTools — suggesting that I take a look at … Continue reading → [Read more...]

A Rule Change in Major League Soccer?

August 23, 2010 | Ryan

I have to admit that working with my Major League Soccer data set has been slow going.  There are a few reasons:  (1) I have a full-time job at the National Renewable Energy Lab and (2) the data isn’t quite … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Goals per Game in MLS

August 16, 2010 | Ryan

I promised something related to Major League Soccer and here it is.  Caveat:  It’s not much.  Why so sparse?  (1) The data is a bit messy due to teams folding, expansion, name changes, etc.  (2)  I was backpacking all weekend and didn’t have time to work on this side project.  ... [Read more...]

Apologies and Style Guides

August 13, 2010 | Ryan

I have to say that it’s pretty exciting to watch your blog go from a few hits over its lifetime to getting almost 200 in a single day.  I am currently negotiating with Google over the purchase of this blog.  Or maybe not.  Again, thanks be to @revodavid for posting ... [Read more...]
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