Previously in this series The “lost boarding pass” puzzle The “deadly board game” puzzle The “knight on an infinite chessboard” puzzle The “largest stock profit or loss” puzzle The “birthday paradox” puzzle The “Spelling Bee honeycomb” puzzle Feller’s “coin-tossing” puzzle The “spam comments” puzzle I love 538’s Riddler column, ... [Read more...]

Previously in this series: The “lost boarding pass” puzzle The “deadly board game” puzzle The “knight on an infinite chessboard” puzzle The “largest stock profit or loss” puzzle The “birthday paradox” puzzle The “Spelling Bee honeycomb” puzzle Feller’s “coin-tossing” puzzle I love 538’s Riddler column, and the April 10 puzzle ... [Read more...]

Previously in this series: The “lost boarding pass” puzzle The “deadly board game” puzzle The “knight on an infinite chessboard” puzzle The “largest stock profit or loss” puzzle The “birthday paradox” puzzle I have an interest in probability puzzles and riddles, and especially in simulating them in R. I recently ... [Read more...]

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Previously in this series: The “lost boarding pass” puzzle The “deadly board game” puzzle The “knight on an infinite chessboard” puzzle The “largest stock profit or loss” puzzle The birthday problem is a classic probability ... [Read more...]

Previously in this series: The “knight on an infinite chessboard” puzzle The “lost boarding pass” puzzle The “deadly board game” puzzle I recently came across an interview problem from A Cool SQL Problem: Avoiding For-Loops . Avoiding loops is a topic I always enjoy reading about, and the blog post didn’... [Read more...]

Previously in this series: The “lost boarding pass” puzzle The “deadly board game” puzzle I’ve recently been enjoying The Riddler: Fantastic Puzzles from FiveThirtyEight, a wonderful book from 538’s Oliver Roeder. Many of the probab... [Read more...]

I recently came up with the idea for a series of screencasts: I've thought about recording a screencast of an example data analysis in #rstats. I'd do it on a dataset I'm unfamiliar with so that I can show and narrate my live thought process.Any suggestions for interesting datasets ... [Read more...]

Like a lot of people, I was intrigued by “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, an anonymous New York Times op-ed written by a “senior official in the Trump administration”. And like many data scientists, I was curious about what role text mining could play. Ok ... [Read more...]

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In a recent post, I offered a definition of the distinction between data science and machine learning: that data science is focused on extracting insights, while machine learning is interested in making predictions. I also noted that the two fields greatly overlap: I use both machine learning and data science ... [Read more...]

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Last week I shared a thought on Twitter: When you’ve written the same code 3 times, write a functionWhen you’ve given the same in-person advice 3 times, write a blog post— David Robinson (@drob) November 9, 2017 Ironically, this tweet hints at a piece of advice I’ve given at least 3 dozen ... [Read more...]

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Imagine you were going to a party in an unfamiliar area, and asked the host for directions to their house. It takes you thirty minutes to get there, on a path that takes you on a long winding road with slow traffic. As the party ends, the host tells you “... [Read more...]

A year ago today, I wrote up a blog post Text analysis of Trump’s tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half. My analysis, shown below, concludes that the Android and iPhone tweets are clearly from different people, posting during different times of day and using hashtags, links, ... [Read more...]

A few years ago, I wrote a post Don’t teach built-in plotting to beginners (teach ggplot2). I argued that ggplot2 was not an advanced approach meant for experts, but rather a suitable introduction to data visualization. Many teachers suggest I’m overestimating their students: “No, see, my students are ... [Read more...]

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