Programmatic access to biodiversity data is revolutionising large-scale, reproducible biodiversity research. In the marine realm, the largest global database of species occurrence records is the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, OBIS. As of January 2017, OBIS contains 47.78 million occurrences of 117,345 species, all openly available and accessible via the OBIS API. The number ... [Read more...]

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Quite some years ago, whilst working on the EU Sixth Framework project Euro-limpacs, I organized a workshop on statistical methods for analyzing time series data. One of the sessions was on the analysis of extremes, ably given by Paul Northrop (UCL Department of Statistical Science). That intro certainly whet my ... [Read more...]

A couple of weeks ago, I had a discussion with a co-worker regarding a project I was involved in, I felt that there was no clear understanding of the daily challenges data scientists face. Few days later, I was at Rstudio::Conf 2017 where I met lots of data scientists from ... [Read more...]

A chance occurrence on X validated: a question on an incomprehensible formula for Bayesian model choice: which, most unfortunately!, appeared in Bayesian Essentials with R! Eeech! It looks like one line in our LATEX file got erased and the likelihood part in the denominator altogether vanished. Apologies to all readers ... [Read more...]

Microsoft R Server 9 includes a new R package for machine learning: MicrosoftML. (So do the Data Science Virtual Machine and the free Microsoft R Client edition, incidentally.) This package includes a suite of fast predictive modeling functions implemented by Microsoft Research, including: Linear (rxFastLinear) and logistic (rxLogisticRegression) model functions based ... [Read more...]

Mixed models In the previous posts we have discussed pure additive and pure multiplicative exponential smoothing models. The next logical step would be to discuss mixed models, where some components have additive and the others have multiplicative nature. But we won’t spend much time on them because I personally ... [Read more...]

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RENDER FUNCTIONS In the fourth part of our series we just “scratched the surface” of reactivity by analyzing some of the properties of the renderTable function. Now it is time to get deeper and learn how to use the rest of the render functions that shiny provides. As you were ... [Read more...]

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For some purpose I found myself generating and analyzing the average of the combinations of a set and when I generated the corresponding histogram I was surprised by its shape.It should be remembered that the combinations C(m, n) of a set are the number of subsets of a ... [Read more...]

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Solution to Euler Problem 9 in the R Language: Find the Pythagorean triple for which a+b+c equals 1000. Continue reading → The post Euler Problem 9 : Special Pythagorean Triple appeared first on The Devil is in the Data. [Read more...]

In several recent blog posts, I've emphasized the importance of data analysis. My main point has been, that if you want to learn data science, you need to learn data analysis. Data analysis is the foundation of practical data science. With that statement in mind, I want to show you ... [Read more...]

“… avoiding catastrophe becomes the first principle in bringing color to information: Above all, do no harm.” - Envisioning Information, Edward Tufte, Graphics Press, 1990 Choosing colors for your plot is not so simple. Why is that so? First of all, it depends on numerous things… What plot are you creating? What ... [Read more...]

Share This: XGBoost is a comprehensive machine learning library for gradient boosting. It began from the Kaggle community for online machine learning challenges, and then maintained by the collaborative efforts from the developers in the community. It is well known for its accuracy, efficiency and flexibility for various interfaces: the ... [Read more...]

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Sort of introduction to this post and hopefully the next ones I usually don’t have any New Year resolution. However, recent tweets about productivity – from people I actually find productive and inspiring – made me ponder a bit on my unfinished... [Read more...]

Since a few new events have been announced recently, I thought I'd give a run-down on some major R conferences coming up in the next six months. February 18: satRdays, Cape Town (South Africa). This is the second in a series of one-day conferences inspired by an R Consortium proposal. The ... [Read more...]

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