Network Analysis: Who is the Most Important Influencer?

Networks are everywhere: traffic infrastructure and the internet come to mind, but networks are also in nature: food chains, protein-interaction networks, genetic interaction networks and of course neural networks which are being modelled by Artificial Neural Networks.

In this post, we will create a small network (also called graph mathematically) and ask some question about which is the “most important” node (also called vertex, pl. vertices). If you want to understand important concepts of network centrality and how to calculate those in R, read on!
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Local Differential Privacy: Getting Honest Answers on Embarrassing Questions

Do you cheat on your partner? Do you take drugs? Are you gay? Are you an atheist? Did you have an abortion? Will you vote for the right-wing candidate? Not all people feel comfortable answering those kinds of questions in every situation honestly.

So, is there a method to find the respective proportion of people without putting them on the spot? Actually, there is! If you want to learn about randomized response (and how to create flowcharts in R along the way) read on!
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Doing Maths Symbolically: R as a Computer Algebra System (CAS)


When I first saw the Computer Algebra System Mathematica in the nineties I was instantly fascinated by it: you could not just calculate things with it but solve equations, simplify, differentiate and integrate expressions and even solve simple differential equations… not just numerically but symbolically! It helped me a lot during my studies at the university back then. Normally you cannot do this kind of stuff with R but fear not, there is, of course, a package for that!
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Kalman Filter as a Form of Bayesian Updating


The Kalman filter is a very powerful algorithm to optimally include uncertain information from a dynamically changing system to come up with the best educated guess about the current state of the system. Applications include (car) navigation and stock forecasting. If you want to understand how a Kalman filter works and build a toy example in R, read on!
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