The Biometrics group at Telethon Kids Institute uses a standardised template project directory to manage our biostatistical consultation projects. This approach allows us to streamline our workflow, initiate projects, and produce professional looking reports directly from the statistical analysis platform minimising the time spent on the non-analytical aspects of our ...

Introduction In this post, I will perform a text mining analysis of two important philosophical works on the topic of individual liberty: John Locke’s Second Treatise of Governement and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. I will rely mainly on the tidytext package, as described in the book Text ...

Approximately 136 new packages stuck to CRAN in June. (This number is difficult to nail down with certainty because packages may be removed from CRAN after sitting there for a few days.) Here are my picks for the June “Top 40” in ten categories: Computational Methods, Data, Finance, Genomics, Machine Learning, Science ...

This post will compare Python’s BeautifulSoup package to R’s rvest package for web scraping. We’ll also talk about additional functionality in rvest (that doesn’t exist in BeautifulSoup) in comparison to a couple of other Python packages (including pandas and RoboBrowser). Getting started BeautifulSoup and rvest both ...

Intro I’ve discussed on several blog posts how Causal Inference involves making inference about unobserved quantities and distributions (e.g. we never observe \(Y|do(x)\)). That means we can’t benchmark different algorithms on Causal Inference tas...

Intro I’ve discussed on several blog posts how Causal Inference involves making inference about unobserved quantities and distributions (e.g. we never observe \(Y|do(x)\)). That means we can’t benchmark different algorithms on Causal Inference tasks (e.g \(ATE/CATE\) estimation) the same way we do in ...

An interesting question (with no clear motivation) on X validated wondering why a Gibbs sampler produces NAs… Interesting because multi-layered: The attached R code indeed produces NAs because it calls the Negative Binomial Neg(x¹,p) random generator with a zero success parameter, x¹=0, which automatically returns NAs. This can ...

At useR!2019 in Toulouse, ThinkR opened a quizz allowing to win a pipe knight. About a hundred of respondents won this Playmobil. In this blog post, we review the questions and respondents answers. We’ll see that the crowd as almost always right, but they do not know who the ...

As a blogger and curriculum developer, I am often writing about R from a text editor instead of RStudio. I feared that working outside RStudio meant saying goodbye to fantastic hotkeys it provides. Isn’t there a way, I wondered, to set up a keyboard shortcut on my computer so ...

Introduction In a previous post, we had introduced our R package rfm but did not go into the conceptual details of RFM analysis. In this post, we will explore RFM in much more depth and work through a case study as well. RFM (Recency, Frequency & Monetary) analysis is a behavior ...

Introduction In a previous post, we had introduced our R package rfm but did not go into the conceptual details of RFM analysis. In this post, we will explore RFM in much more depth and work through a case study as well. RFM (Recency, Frequency & Monetary) analysis is a behavior ...

When we have many similar models to fit, automating at least some portions of the task can be a real time saver. In my last post I demonstrated how to make a function for model fitting. Once you have made such a function it’s possible to loop through variable ...

R is great for report generation. Shiny allows us to easily create web apps that generate a variety of reports with R. This post details a demo Shiny app that generates an Excel report, a PowerPoint report, and a PDF report: The full Shiny app source code is available here. ...

How can we infer actors’ positions, substantive topics, or sentiments from (political) texts? This Methods Bites Tutorial by Julian Bernauer summarizes Denise Traber’s workshop in the MZES Social Science Data Lab in Spring 2018. Using exemplary sets of political documents (election manifestos and coalition agreements), it showcases tools of QTA ...