Author: Learning Machines

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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Time Series Analysis: Forecasting Sales Data with Autoregressive (AR) Models


Forecasting the future has always been one of man’s biggest desires and many approaches have been tried over the centuries. In this post we will look at a simple statistical method for time series analysis, called AR for Autoregressive Model. We will use this method to predict future sales data and will rebuild it to get a deeper understanding of how this method works, so read on!
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COVID-19: False Positive Alarm

In this post, we are going to replicate an analysis from the current issue of Scientific American about a common mathematical pitfall of Coronavirus antibody tests with R.

Many people think that when they get a positive result of such a test they are immune to the virus with high probability. If you want to find out why nothing could be further from the truth, read on!
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Learning Data Science: A/B Testing in Under One Minute


Google does it! Facebook does it! Amazon does it for sure!

Especially in the areas of web design and online advertising, everybody is talking about A/B testing. If you quickly want to understand what it is and how you can do it with R, read on!
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Learning R: Build a Password Generator


It is not easy to create secure passwords. The best way is to let a computer do it by randomly combining lower- and upper-case letters, digits and other printable characters.

If you want to learn how to write a small function to achieve that read on!
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Learning Statistics: Randomness is a Strange Beast


Our intuition concerning randomness is, strangely enough, quite limited. While we expect it to behave in certain ways (which it doesn’t) it shows some regularities that have unexpected consequences. In a series of seemingly random posts, I will highlight some of those regularities as well as consequences. If you want to learn something about randomness’ strange behaviour and gain some intuition read on!
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