Articles by Sharp Sight Labs

How to make a simple heatmap in ggplot2

November 15, 2016 | Sharp Sight Labs

In the world of data visualization, the heatmap is underrated and underutilized. It has limitations, but overall, it’s an excellent tool in your data science and data visualization toolkit. After you’ve mastered the foundational visualization techniques (you can write the code for the basic plots in your sleep, ... [Read more...]

Stop trying to jump to the sexy stuff first

September 21, 2016 | Sharp Sight Labs

A few weeks ago, an acquaintance told me that he was interested in getting started with machine learning. He’s a web developer who primarily works in Ruby and Python, but also has a small amount of experience with R. Day-to-day, his work is run-of-the-mill web development, and he’s ... [Read more...]

Mapping global venture capital investment

September 14, 2016 | Sharp Sight Labs

Claims of “the end of geography” and the flatness of the world notwithstanding, place still matters today. Discussing why place matters is somewhat beyond the scope of this post, so I will direct you to the excellent work of Parag Khanna and his book Connectography. To put it simply, the ... [Read more...]

The one machine learning concept you need to know

April 25, 2016 | Sharp Sight Labs

Machine learning is hard. Some people spend weeks, months, even years trying to learn machine learning without any success. They play around with datasets, buy books, compete on Kaggle, but ultimately make little progress. One of the big problems, is that many people just want to “dive in and build ... [Read more...]

Mapping Paris bikes stands

March 3, 2015 | Sharp Sight Labs

A Sharp Sight Labs reader (and now student), Jason P. recently started learning data science. He has a background in data analysis (primarily with Excel and related tools in the Microsoft ecosystem) but he wanted to start learning some of the harder skills of data science. He contacted me after ... [Read more...]

Why you should learn R first for data science

January 26, 2015 | Sharp Sight Labs

Over and over, when talking with people who are starting to learn data science, there’s a frustration that comes up: I don’t know which programming language to start with.” And it’s not just programming languages, it’s also software systems like Tableau, SPSS, etc. There is an ... [Read more...]

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)