by Joseph Rickert Random Forests, the "go to" classifier for many data scientists, is a fairly complex algorithm with many moving parts that introduces randomness at different levels. Understanding exactly how the algorithm operates requires some work, and assessing how good a Random Forests model fits the data is a ... [Read more...]

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I wrote a year ago on a way to declutter shiny report code which involved putting objects into a sourced file, however, at that point in time the solution was a bit brittle and clunky. Now there’s a better way to develop shiny applications – shiny modules. In October, RStudio ... [Read more...]

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I often find myself in the situation where I need to log into a remote machine to do analysis in R but do not have a satisfactory way to view output of graphics being generated in the remote session. There are many possible ways to work graphically wi... [Read more...]

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Win-Vector LLC has been offering a couple of online video courses on the topics of data science and A/B testing (both using R). These are high quality courses and well worth the money and time needed to work through them closely (with all materials distributed on GitHub). Our current ... [Read more...]

Super Tuesday 2016 has come and gone, we have most of the election results, but what were the American public saying on Twitter? The twitteR package for R allows you to scrape tweets from Twitter’s API and use them to form sentiment analysis. The Plotly chart below shows what the ... [Read more...]

The following is a guest post by Philipp Prettl and Lion Weber (University of Konstanz), with support from Simon Munzert. Did you ever want to track trending topics on Twitter, but missed to start the tracking as an event took off? Are you interested in mining massive amounts of Twitter ... [Read more...]

Microsoft has updated the Data Science Virtual Machine, a data science toolkit-in-a-box that you can easily spin up on the Microsoft Azure cloud service. The virtual machine now comes pre-configured with Microsoft R Server Developer Edition (upgraded from Microsoft R Open), Anaconda Python, Jupyter notebooks for Python and R, Visual ... [Read more...]

The mefa4 R package is aimed at efficient manipulation of very big data sets leveraging sparse matrices thanks to the Matrix package. The recent update (version 0.3-3) of the package includes a bugfix and few new functions to compare sets and finding dominant features in compositional data as described in ... [Read more...]

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This is the 12th year Google offering grants to students living (almost) anywhere in the world for working on various open-source projects at the summer, and R was again selected as a GSoC mentor organization, just like in eg 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 or 2015.In short, Google offers $5,000 to the accepted students to work ... [Read more...]

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We know soccer is a low scoring sport, but how many matches do you think end within one goal of 1-0? The post Most soccer matches are within one goal of 1-0 appeared first on Decision Science News. [Read more...]

A couple of years ago, when an NPR journalist was interviewing me, the conversation turned to quantitative matters. The reporter said, only half jokingly, “We journalists are innumerate and proud.” :-) Some times it shows, badly. This morning a radio reporter stated, “Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders among South Carolina ... [Read more...]

A good week after the update to Eigen 3.2.8 in our RcppEigen package 0.3.2.8.0, we have another (local) update with RcppEigen 0.3.2.8.1 which should fix another UBSAN issue. This new version in now on CRAN and in Debian. Big thanks once again to Yixu... [Read more...]