About a couple of years ago, I rolled out the flock package to help me synchronize R processes. I have used it ever since, but it wasn’t until recently that I found the time to move the source code to GitHub, and to add the package to CRAN. The ... [Read more...]

Understanding my Neighbors with R and Leaflet - I, like many others across the country have been in total shock and mental disarray at the results from the election this past Tuesday. I’m not sure what to make of my fellow Americans voting for an outright racist, sexist, homophobic ... [Read more...]

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One of the most appealing data visualisation charts are maps. I love maps as they combine an incredible information density with intuitive readability. Also I feel that most people prefer maps over other visualisations. (Is there research on this?) So... [Read more...]

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Microsoft provides some sophisticated Machine Learning tools via its Cognitive Services: Microsoft enables us to access several of its APIs in order to leverage Advanced Analyses. One of these is the Emotion API which can be fed pictures or videos that... [Read more...]

R for Beginners:  Installing the latest version of R on a Linux platform A tutorial by D. M. Wiig One of the nice characteristics of open source software such as R is the rapid development of new releases and updates.  While the base core remains stable for a period of ... [Read more...]

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Deployment of smart grids gives space to an occurrence of new methods of machine learning and data analysis. Smart grids can contain of millions of smart meters, which produce a large amount of data of electricity consumption (long time series). In add... [Read more...]

Nina Zumel and I have been doing a lot of writing on the (important) details of re-encoding high cardinality categorical variables for predictive modeling. These are variables that essentially take on string-values (also called levels or factors) and vary through many such levels. Typical examples include zip-codes, vendor IDs, and ... [Read more...]

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About a decade or so photomosaics were all the rage: a near-recreation of a famous image by using many smaller images as elements. Here, for example, is the Mona Lisa, created using the Metapixel program by overlaying 32x32 images of vehicles and animals. An image like this presents an interesting ... [Read more...]

.fusion-fullwidth-1 { padding-left: px !important; padding-right: px !important; }by Sean Lopp The RStudio IDE reached version 1.0 this month. The IDE has come a long way s... [Read more...]

I'm excited to have contributed to this important (IMHO) interoperability paper around metabolomics data: "SPLASH, a hashed identifier for mass spectra" (doi:10.1038/nbt.3689, readcube:msZj). A huge thanks to all involved in the great collaborative project! The source code project is fully open source and coordinated by Gert Wolgemuth, the ... [Read more...]

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When estimating a model, the quality of the model fit will always be higher in-sample than out-of-sample. A model will always fit the data that it is trained on, warts and all, and may use those warts and statistical noise to make predictions. As a result, a model that performs ... [Read more...]

My adopted home state of Utah has been a weird place this election cycle. For the unfamiliar, Utah is extremely conservative when it comes to politics; it is one of the reddest of the red states and has backed the Republican candidate for president for... [Read more...]