calmcode.io is an e-learning platform that I really really really recommend to programmers and data scientists: It is free. It involves open source tools. It uses bite-sized tutorial videos. It explains tools clearly. It explains everything calmly. There’s tons of content about computer programming, data science, and personal ...

Like many people during the COVID19 crisis, I turned to the stock market as a new hobby. Like the ignorant investor that I am, I thought it wise to hop on the cloud computing bandwagon. Hence, I bought, among others, a small position in Rackspace Technologies. A long way down ...

Finding predictive patterns in your dataset with one line of code! Today — March 2nd 2021 — my first R package was published on the comprehensive R archive network (CRAN). ppsr is the R implementation of the Predictive Power Score (PPS). The PPS is an asymmetric, data-type-agnostic score that can detect linear or ...

A few months ago, I wrote about the Predictive Power Score (PPS): a handy metric to quickly explore and quantify the relationships in a dataset. As a social scientist, I was taught to use a correlation matrix to describe the relationships in a dataset. Yet, in my opinion, the PPS ...

The R programming language has seen the integration of many languages; C, C++, Python, to name a few, can be seamlessly embedded into R so one can conveniently call code written in other languages from the R console. Little known to many, R works just as well with JavaScript—this ...

For a year now, this course on Bayesian statistics has been on my to-do list. So without further ado, I decided to share it with you already. Richard McElreath is an evolutionary ecologist who is famous in the stats community for his work on Bayesian statistics. At the Max Planck ...

Jon Schwabisch recently proposed ten guidelines for better table design. Next to the academic paper, Jon shared his recommendations in a Twitter thread. Let me summarize them for you: Right-align your numbers Left-align your texts Use decimals appropriately (one or two is often enough) Display units (e.g., $, %) sparsely (e....

Jonas Kristoffer Lindeløv wrote a great visual explanation of how the most common statistical tests (t-test, ANOVA, ANCOVA, etc) are all linear models in the back-end. Jonas’ original blog uses R programming to visually show how the tests work, what the linear models look like, and how different approaches ...

David Robinson (aka drob) is one of the best known R programmers. Since a couple of years David has been sharing his knowledge through streaming screencasts of him programming. It’s basically part of R’s #tidytuesday movement. Alex Cookson decided to do us all a favor and annotate all ...

Cohen’s d (wiki) is a statistic used to indicate the standardised difference between two means. Resarchers often use it to compare the averages between groups, for instance to determine that there are higher outcomes values in a experimental group than in a control group. Researchers often use general guidelines ...

Last week, I shared this Medium blog on PPS — or Predictive Power Score — on my LinkedIn and got so many enthousiastic responses, that I had to share it with here too. Basically, the predictive power score is a normalized metric (values range from 0 to 1) that shows you to what extent ...

I really like generative art, or so-called algorithmic art. Basically, it means you take a pattern or a complex system of rules, and apply it to create something new following those patterns/rules. When I finished my PhD, I got a beautiful poster of where the k-nearest neighbors algorithms was ...

Book publisher Springer just released over 400 book titles that can be downloaded free of charge following the corona-virus outbreak. Here’s fhe full overview: https://link.springer.com/search?facet-content-type=%22Book%22&package=mat-covid19_textbooks&facet-language=%22En%22&sortOrder=newestFirst&showAll=true Most of these books will normally set you back about $50 ...

I recently visited a data science meetup where one of the speakers spoke about playing out the Monty Hall problem with his kids. The Monty Hall problem is probability puzzle. Based on the American television game show Let’s Make a Deal and its host, named Monty Hall: You’re ...

Regular expression (also abbreviated to regex) really is a powertool any programmer should know. It was and is one of the things I most liked learning, as it provides you with immediate, godlike powers that can speed up your (data science) workflow tenfold. I’ve covered many regex related topics ...

Grant McDermott develop this new R package I had thought of: parttree parttree includes a set of simple functions for visualizing decision tree partitions in R with ggplot2. The package is not yet on CRAN, but can be installed from GitHub using: Using the familiar ggplot2 syntax, we can simply ...

One best practice in visualization is to make your color scheme consistent across figures. For instance, if you’re making multiple plots of the dataset — say a group of 5 companies — you want to have each company have the same, consistent coloring across all these plots. R has some great data ...

Looking for just the right colors for your data visualization? I often cover tools to pick color palettes on my website (e.g. here, here, or here) and also host a comprehensive list of color packages in my R programming resources overview. However, paletteer is by far my favorite package ...