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 in formal speech or writing. Words such as informal contractions...
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 →
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 →
During the first part of our meeting, Ryan Rosario presented on the topic of large datasets in R. Video, slides and code of the talk “Taking R to the Limit: Large Datasets” by Ryan Rosario at the Los Angeles area … Continue reading →
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 →
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. Yes, I have a real 
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 to the Revolution Analytics Blog. 
On July 29, 2010, I had a flight from Denver to Cincinnati. About an hour before boarding, I went to ESPN’s website and found a new article by Bill Simmons, a.k.a The Sports Guy (@sportsguy33 on Twitter). The basic premise of this article is that a core group of fans is losing interest in Red 
Tuesday night I had the opportunity to present on high performance computing in R, and the Los Angeles R Users’ Group. There was so much to talk about that I had to split my talk into two parts. The first part was parallelization and the second ...
This week I had the opportunity the trek up north to Silicon Valley to attend Yahoo’s Hadoop Summit 2010. I love Silicon Valley. The few times I’ve been there the weather was perfect (often warmer than LA), little to no traffic, no road rage and people overall seem friendly and happy. Not to mention there are so many trees...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
