Month: June 2019

Understanding AdaBoost – or how to turn Weakness into Strength


Many of you might have heard of the concept “Wisdom of the Crowd”: when many people independently guess some quantity, e.g. the number of marbles in a jar glass, the average of their guesses is often pretty accurate – even though many of the guesses are totally off.

The same principle is at work in so-called ensemble methods, like bagging and boosting. If you want to know more about boosting and how to turn pseudocode of a scientific paper into valid R code read on…
Continue reading “Understanding AdaBoost – or how to turn Weakness into Strength”

From Coin Tosses to p-Hacking: Make Statistics Significant Again!


One of the most notoriously difficult subjects in statistics is the concept of statistical tests. We will explain the ideas behind it step by step to give you some intuition on how to use (and misuse) it, so read on…
Continue reading “From Coin Tosses to p-Hacking: Make Statistics Significant Again!”

Learning R: Permutations and Combinations with Base R


The area of combinatorics, the art of systematic counting, is dreaded territory for many people, so let us bring some light into the matter: in this post we will explain the difference between permutations and combinations, with and without repetitions (also called replacements), will calculate the number of possibilities and present efficient R code to enumerate all of them, so read on…
Continue reading “Learning R: Permutations and Combinations with Base R”