TL;DR: I wrote a web scraper to help me make fake money. I’ve been playing around with an online marketplace called the “Hollywood Stock Exchange” for a couple of months now. The website is basically “fantasy” for actors, directors and upcom... [Read more...]

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When faced with classification tasks in the real world, it can be challenging to deal with an outcome where one class heavily outweighs the other (a.k.a., imbalanced classes). The following will be a two-part post on some of the techniques that can hel... [Read more...]

When faced with classification tasks in the real world, it can be challenging to deal with an outcome where one class heavily outweighs the other (a.k.a., imbalanced classes). The following will be a two-part post on some of the techniques that can hel... [Read more...]

This note explains to compile Hadley Wickham’s ggplot2 book on Mac OS. This guide has 8 steps. If you have already installed R and RStudio, you should be able to get through Steps 1-4 very quickly. Similarly, if you use Git, Steps 5-6 should also be very straightforward. The longest ... [Read more...]

Since I am already knocked out of the playoffs (our league playoffs start in week 12), I thought it would be interesting to see which players ended up being the best and worst values of this years draft. It’s only week 13 so these numbers will change by the end of ... [Read more...]

I was thrilled to be invited to speak at the Monktoberfest conference, held this past October in Portland, Maine. Not only have I been a great fan of the analysis from the Redmonk team for many years, I'd heard that it was one of the most interesting and diverse tech ... [Read more...]

by Sean Lopp Here is this month’s collection of RStudio Tips and Tricks. Thank you to those who responded to last month’s post; many of your tips are included below! Be sure to subscribe to @rstudiotips on Twitter for more. This month’s tips fall into two categories: ... [Read more...]

Using the knowledge you acquired in the previous exercises on sampling and selecting(here), we will now go through an entire data analysis process. You will be using what you know as crutches to solve the problems. Don’t worry. It might look intimidating but follow the sequence and you ... [Read more...]

Introduction I have completed this specialization more than a year ago but I have decided to write again about it because I'm teaching Data Visualization at Universidad de Chile and JHU materials has proven to be an excellent source for my students. If you want to read more about this ... [Read more...]

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Outliers in data can distort predictions and affect the accuracy, if you don’t detect and handle them appropriately especially in regression models. Why outliers treatment is important? Because, it can drastically bias/change the fit estimates and predictions. Let me illustrate this using the cars dataset. To better understand ... [Read more...]

Out-of-sample extrapolation This post is an offshoot of some simple experiments I made to help clarify my thinking about some machine learning methods. In this experiment I fit four kinds of model to a super-simple artificial dataset with two columns, x and y; and then try to predict new values ... [Read more...]

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This week we released version 1.0 of the ropensci pdftools package to CRAN. Pdftools provides utilities for extracting text, fonts, attachments and other data from PDF files. It also supports rendering of PDF files into bitmap images. This release has a few internal enhancements and fixes an annoying bug for landscape ... [Read more...]