Painting Santa with Letters


After my little rant (which went viral!) about the tidyverse from last week, we are going to do a little fun project in the 50’th 🙂 post of this blog: ASCII Art! If you want to have some fun by painting with letters (i.e. ASCII characters) in R and get to see a direct comparison of tidyverse and base R code, read on!
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Why I don’t use the Tidyverse


There seems to be some revolution going on in the R sphere… people seem to be jumping at what is commonly known as the tidyverse, a collection of packages developed and maintained by the Chief Scientist of RStudio, Hadley Wickham.

In this post, I explain what the tidyverse is and why I resist using it, so read on!
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Learning R: Data Wrangling in Password Hacking Game


Data Scientists know that about 80% of a Data Science project consists of preparing the data so that they can be analyzed. Building Machine Learning models is the fun part that only comes afterwards!

This process is called Data Wrangling (or Data Munging). If you want to use some Base R data wrangling techniques in a fun game to hack a password read on!
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Teach R to see by Borrowing a Brain


It has been an old dream to teach a computer to see, i.e. to hold something in front of a camera and let the computer tell you what it sees. For decades it has been exactly that: a dream – because we as human beings are able to see, we just don’t know how we do it, let alone be precise enough to put it into algorithmic form.

Enter machine learning!
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Data Science on Rails: Analyzing Customer Churn

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is not only about acquiring new customers but especially about retaining existing ones. That is because acquisition is often much more expensive than retention. In this post, we learn how to analyze the reasons of customer churn (i.e. customers leaving the company). We do this with a very convenient point-and-click interface for doing data science on top of R, so read on!
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Finding free Science Books from Springer


Today the biggest book fair of the world starts again in Frankfurt, Germany. I thought this might be a good opportunity to do you some good!

Springer is one of the most renowned scientific publishing companies in the world. Normally, their books are quite expensive but also in the publishing business Open Access is a megatrend.

If you want to use R in a little fun project to find the latest additions of open access books to their program read on!
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Cambridge Analytica: Microtargeting or How to catch voters with the LASSO


The two most disruptive political events of the last few years are undoubtedly the Brexit referendum to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump. Both are commonly associated with the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and a technique known as Microtargeting.

If you want to understand the data science behind the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data scandal and Microtargeting (i.e. LASSO regression) by building a toy example in R read on!
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Learning Data Science: The Supermarket Knows You are Pregnant Before Your Dad does!


A few months ago, I posted about market basket analysis (see Customers who bought…), in this post we will see another form of it, done with Logistic Regression, so read on…
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Learning Data Science: Understanding and Using k-means Clustering


A few months ago I published a quite popular post on Clustering the Bible… one well known clustering algorithm is k-means. If you want to learn how k-means works and how to apply it in a real-world example, read on…
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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…
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