Cats are great. Perhaps Hadley Wickham and Lionel Henry think so too given the wonderful choice of name for their purrr package. Hadley Wickham has also created a superb package called forcats, likely  an abbreviation of “for categoricals” but wittingly cat-themed, which is very, very useful to the data scientist. ...

Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) linear regression is a statistical technique used for the analysis and modelling of linear relationships between a response variable and one or more predictor variables. If the relationship between two variables appears to be linear, then a straight line can be fit to the data in ...

A very useful data visualisation tool in science, particularly in medical and sports settings, is the Bland-Altman/Tukey Mean-Difference plot. When comparing two sets of measurements for the same variable made by different instruments, it is often required to determine whether the instruments are in agreement or not. Correlation and ...

R is my language of choice for data science but a good data scientist should have some knowledge of all of the great tools available to them. Recently, I have been gleefully using Python for machine learning problems (specifically pandas and the wonderful scikit-learn). However, for all its greatness, I ...

A Brief Introduction Linear regression is a classic supervised statistical technique for predictive modelling which is based on the linear hypothesis: y = mx + c where y is the response or outcome variable, m is the gradient of the linear trend-line, x is the predictor variable and c is the intercept. ...

In an earlier post of mine, I carried out an analysis on ski jumping data for Zakopane, Poland and attempted to predict which athletes would end up on the podium. I also created a classification tree and tested it on the 2017 competition data with good results. For this side project ...

Movies of late haven’t impressed (this viewer anyhow) and I keep finding myself returning to classics of the 1980’s and 1990’s to get my movie fix. While browsing through Kaggle datasets, I came across the IMDB 5000 Movie Dataset which contains data on over 5000 movies scraped from the IMDB website. ...

Travelling to a warm country and plan on hitting the beach? “Beware of the sharks!!” While the expression has almost become a cliché at this stage, shark attacks do occur and the fact that the global ocean is heating up potentially facilitates the occurrence of attacks (I would refer to ...

When I was a young boy with a wild imagination, I used to try my hand at numerous sports ranging from tennis to gaelic footbal to soccer, each with varying degrees of success. Living in the countryside throughout my childhood, a big garden allowed me to construct vivid simulations of ...

Researchers say ocean acidification may have dramatic effects on phytoplankton. Edit section Phytoplankton, tiny plants which live in the ocean, form the foundation of the marine food web and play an important role in the regulation of Earth’s climate. These wonderful organisms create their own food using sunlight, nutrients ...

We know much as a species yet we have so much more to learn. Each of us alive today could just as easily have been born into consciousness centuries or millenia ago, and have had little idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun nor that our solar system was ...

The Earth’s oceans, soils, and freshwater bodies are acidifying. Acid rain was in the media a lot in the 80’s and 90’s but has been forgotten as of late. This ignored menace is having many negative effects on the environment. Fossil fuel combustion, transportation emissions, deforestation, and the mining ...