One of the trickier tasks in clustering is determining the appropriate number of clusters. Domain-specific knowledge is always best, when you have it, but there are a number of heuristics for getting at the likely number of clusters in your data. We cover a few of them in Chapter 8 (available as a free sample … Continue reading Finding the K in K-means by Parametric Bootstrap
There remains a bit of a two-way snobbery that Frequentist statistics is what we teach (as so-called objective statistics remain the same no matter who works with them) and Bayesian statistics is what we do (as it tends to directly estimate posterior probabilities we are actually interested in). Nina Zumel hit the nail on the … Continue reading Baking priors
Differential privacy was originally developed to facilitate secure analysis over sensitive data, with mixed success. It’s back in the news again now, with exciting results from Cynthia Dwork, et. al. (see references at the end of the article) that apply results from differential privacy to machine learning. In this article we’ll work through the definition … Continue reading A Simpler Explanation of Differential Privacy
When we teach data science we emphasize the data scientist’s responsibility to transform available data from multiple systems of record into a wide or denormalized form. In such a “ready to analyze” form each individual example gets a row of data and every fact about the example is a column. Usually transforming data into this … Continue reading Working with Sessionized Data 1: Evaluating Hazard Models →
In this note am going to recount “my favorite R bug.” It isn’t a bug in R. It is a bug in some code I wrote in R. I call it my favorite bug, as it is easy to commit and (thanks to R’s overly helpful nature) takes longer than it should to find. ...
It’s a folk theorem I sometimes hear from colleagues and clients: that you must balance the class prevalence before training a classifier. Certainly, I believe that classification tends to be easier when the classes are nearly balanced, especially when the class you are actually interested in is the rarer one. But I have always been … Continue reading Does Balancing Classes Improve Classifier Performance? → Related posts: Don’t use correlation…
While skimming Professor Hadley Wickham’s Advanced R I got to thinking about nature of the square-bracket or extract operator in R. It turns out “[,]” is a bit more irregular than I remembered. The subsetting section of Advanced R has a very good discussion on the subsetting and selection operators found in R. In particular … Continue reading R bracket is a bit irregular → Related posts: R annoyances Selection…
Most data science projects are well served by a random test/train split. In our book Practical Data Science with R we strongly advise preparing data and including enough variables so that data is exchangeable, and scoring classifiers using a random test/train split. With enough data and a big enough arsenal of methods, it’s relatively easy … Continue reading Random Test/Train Split is not Always Enough → Related posts: Does Balancing…
As John mentioned in his last post, we have been quite interested in the recent study by Fernandez-Delgado, et.al., “Do we Need Hundreds of Classifiers to Solve Real World Classification Problems?” (the “DWN study” for short), which evaluated 179 popular implementations of common classification algorithms over 120 or so data sets, mostly from the UCI … Continue reading The Geometry of Classifiers → Related posts: Does Balancing Classes Improve Classifier…
As we’ve mentioned on previous occasions, one of the defining characteristics of data science is the emphasis on the availability of “large” data sets, which we define as “enough data that statistical efficiency is not a concern” (note that a “large” data set need not be “big data,” however you choose to define it). In … Continue reading Estimating Generalization Error with the PRESS statistic → Related posts: Don’t use…
