I have written about referential transparency before. In this article I would like to discuss “leaky abstractions” and why wrapr::let() supplies a useful (but leaky) abstraction for R programmers. Abstractions A common definition of an abstraction is (from the OSX dictionary): the process of considering something independently of its associations, attributes, or concrete accompaniments. In … Continue reading Why to use wrapr::let()
(or: how to correctly use xgboost from R) R has "one-hot" encoding hidden in most of its modeling paths. Asking an R user where one-hot encoding is used is like asking a fish where there is water; they can’t point to it as it is everywhere. For example we can see evidence of one-hot encoding … Continue reading Encoding categorical variables: one-hot and beyond
There are a number of statistical principles that are perhaps more honored in the breach than in the observance. For fun I am going to name a few, and show why they are not always the “precision surgical knives of thought” one would hope for (working more like large hammers). The litany of complaints A … Continue reading You can’t do that in statistics
Authors: John Mount and Nina Zumel. Introduction It has been our experience when teaching the data wrangling part of data science that students often have difficulty understanding the conversion to and from row-oriented and column-oriented data formats (what is commonly called pivoting and un-pivoting). Boris Artzybasheff illustration Real trust and understanding of this concept doesn’t … Continue reading Coordinatized Data: A Fluid Data Specification
This is a note on debugging magrittr pipelines in R using Bizarro Pipe and eager assignment. Pipes in R The magrittr R package supplies an operator called “pipe” which is written as “%>%“. The pipe operator is partly famous due to its extensive use in dplyr and use by dplyr users. The pipe operator is … Continue reading Debugging Pipelines in R with Bizarro Pipe and Eager Assignment
I recently got back from Strata West 2017 (where I ran a very well received workshop on R and Spark). One thing that really stood out for me at the exhibition hall was Bokeh plus datashader from Continuum Analytics. I had the privilege of having Peter Wang himself demonstrate datashader for me and answer a … Continue reading Datashader is a big deal
Our book Practical Data Science with R has just been reviewed in Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (ACM SIGACT) News by Dr. Allan M. Miller (U.C. Berkeley)! The book is half off at Manning form March 21st 2017 using the following code (please share/Tweet): Deal of the Day … Continue reading Practical Data Science with R: ACM SIGACT News Book Review and Discount!
Our book Practical Data Science with R has just been reviewed in Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computation Theory (ACM SIGACT) News by Dr. Allan M. Miller (U.C. Berkeley)! The book is half off at Manning March 21st 2017 using the following code (please share/Tweet): Deal of the Day March … Continue reading Practical Data Science with R: ACM SIGACT News Book Review and Discount!
I have new short screencast up: using R and RStudio to install and experiment with Apache Spark. More material from my recent Strata workshop Modeling big data with R, sparklyr, and Apache Spark can be found here.
This post concludes our mini-series of Win-Vector open source R packages. We end with WVPlots, a collection of ready-made ggplot2 plots we find handy. Please read on for list of some of the Win-Vector LLC open-source R packages that we are pleased to share. For each package we have prepared a short introduction, so you … Continue reading Some Win-Vector R packages
