We are in the last stages of proofing the galleys/typesetting of Zumel, Mount, Practical Data Science with R, 2nd Edition, Manning 2019. So this edition will definitely be out soon! If you ever wanted to see what Nina Zumel and John Mount are like when we have the help of editors, this book is your … Continue reading Practical Data Science with R 2nd Edition update
Author: John Mount
Free R/datascience Extract: Evaluating a Classification Model with a Spam Filter
We are excited to share a free extract of Zumel, Mount, Practical Data Science with R, 2nd Edition, Manning 2019: Evaluating a Classification Model with a Spam Filter. This section reflects an important design decision in the book: teach model evaluation first, and as a step separate from model construction. It is funny, but it … Continue reading Free R/datascience Extract: Evaluating a Classification Model with a Spam Filter
AI for Engineers
For the last year we (Nina Zumel, and myself: John Mount) have had the honor of teaching the AI200 portion of LinkedIn’s AI Academy. John Mount at the LinkedIn campus Nina Zumel designed most of the material, and John Mount has been delivering it and bringing her feedback. We’ve just started our 9th cohort. We … Continue reading AI for Engineers
vtreat Cross Validation
Nina Zumel finished new documentation on how vtreat‘s cross validation works, which I want to share here. vtreat is a system that makes data preparation for machine learning a “one-liner” (available in R or available in Python). We have a set of starting off points here. These documents describe what vtreat does for you, you … Continue reading vtreat Cross Validation
You Can Override Just About Anything in R
To understand computations in R, two slogans are helpful: Everything that exists is an object. Everything that happens is a function call. John Chambers In R, the “[” array access operator is a function call. And it is one a user can re-bind to the new effect of their own choosing. Let’s see what sort … Continue reading You Can Override Just About Anything in R
New vtreat Documentation (Starting with Multinomial Classification)
Nina Zumel finished some great new documentation showing how to use Python vtreat to prepare data for multinomial classification mode. And I have finally finished porting the documentation to R vtreat. So we now have good introductions on how to use vtreat to prepare data for the common tasks of: Regression: R regression example, Python … Continue reading New vtreat Documentation (Starting with Multinomial Classification)
How to Prepare Data
Real world data can present a number of challenges to data science workflows. Even properly structured data (each interesting measurement already landed in distinct columns), can present problems, such as missing values and high cardinality categorical variables. In this note we describe some great tools for working with such data. For an example: consider the … Continue reading How to Prepare Data
Preparing Data for Supervised Classification
Nina Zumel has been polishing up new vtreat for Python documentation and tutorials. They are coming out so good that I find to be fair to the R community I must start to back-port this new documentation to vtreat for R. vtreat is a package for systematically preparing data for supervised machine learning tasks such … Continue reading Preparing Data for Supervised Classification
The Advantages of Record Transform Specifications
Nina Zumel had a really great article on how to prepare a nice Keras performance plot using R.
I will use this example to show some of the advantages of cdata record transform specifications.
The model performance data from Keras is in the following…
Practical Data Science with R update
Just got the following note from a new reader: Thank you for writing Practical Data Science with R. It’s challenging for me, but I am learning a lot by following your steps and entering the commands. Wow, this is exactly what Nina Zumel and I hoped for. We wish we could make everything easy, but … Continue reading Practical Data Science with R update
Advanced Data Reshaping in Python and R
This note is a simple data wrangling example worked using both the Python data_algebra package and the R cdata package. Both of these packages make data wrangling easy through he use of coordinatized data concepts (relying heavily on Codd’s “rule of access”). The advantages of data_algebra and cdata are: The user specifies their desired transform … Continue reading Advanced Data Reshaping in Python and R
New Getting Started with vtreat Documentation
Win Vector LLC‘s Dr. Nina Zumel has just released some new vtreat documentation. vtreat is a an all-in one step data preparation system that helps defend your machine learning algorithms from: Missing values Large cardinality categorical variables Novel levels from categorical variables I hoped she could get the Python vtreat documentation up to parity with … Continue reading New Getting Started with vtreat Documentation
Why R?
I was working with our copy editor on Appendix A of Practical Data Science with R, 2nd Edition; Zumel, Mount; Manning 2019, and ran into this little point (unfortunately) buried in the back of the book. In our opinion the R ecosystem is the fastest path to substantial data science, statistical, and machine learning accomplishment. … Continue reading Why R?
It is Time for CRAN to Ban Package Ads
NPM (a popular Javascript package repository) just banned package advertisements. I feel the CRAN repository should do the same. Not all R-users are fully aware of package advertisements. But they clutter up work, interfere with reproducibility, and frankly are just wrong. For example, here is the advertisement code from ggplot2: .onAttach <- function(…) { withr::with_preserve_seed({ … Continue reading It is Time for CRAN to Ban Package Ads
Introducing data_algebra
This article introduces the data_algebra project: a data processing tool family available in R and Python. These tools are designed to transform data either in-memory or on remote databases. In particular we will discuss the Python implementation (also called data_algebra) and its relation to the mature R implementations (rquery and rqdatatable). Introduction Parts of the … Continue reading Introducing data_algebra
Eliminating Tail Calls in Python Using Exceptions
I was working through Kyle Miller‘s excellent note: “Tail call recursion in Python”, and decided to experiment with variations of the techniques. The idea is: one may want to eliminate use of the Python language call-stack in the case of a “tail calls” (a function call where the result is not used by the calling … Continue reading Eliminating Tail Calls in Python Using Exceptions
What is vtreat?
vtreat is a DataFrame processor/conditioner that prepares real-world data for supervised machine learning or predictive modeling in a statistically sound manner. vtreat takes an input DataFrame that has a specified column called “the outcome variable” (or “y”) that is the quantity to be predicted (and must not have missing values). Other input columns are possible … Continue reading What is vtreat?
Speaking at BARUG
We will be speaking at the Tuesday, September 3, 2019 BARUG. If you are in the Bay Area, please come see us. Nina Zumel & John Mount Practical Data Science with R Practical Data Science with R (Zumel and Mount) was one of the first, and most widely-read books on the practice of doing Data … Continue reading Speaking at BARUG
vtreat up on PyPi
I am excited to announce vtreat is now available for Python on PyPi, in addition for R on CRAN. vtreat is: A data.frame processor/conditioner that prepares real-world data for predictive modeling in a statistically sound manner. vtreat prepares variables so that data has fewer exceptional cases, making it easier to safely use models in production. … Continue reading vtreat up on PyPi
Returning to Tides
Fred Viole shared a great “data only” R solution to the forecasting tides problem. The methodology comes from a finance perspective, and has some great associated notes and articles. This gives me a chance to comment on the odd relation between prediction and profit in finance. If there really was a trade-able item with low … Continue reading Returning to Tides