Category: R-Bloggers

Posts that are contributed to R-Bloggers

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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Reinforcement Learning: Life is a Maze


It can be argued that the most important decisions in life are some variant of an exploitation-exploration problem. Shall I stick with my current job or look for a new one? Shall I stay with my partner or seek a new love? Shall I continue reading the book or watch the movie instead? In all of those cases, the question is always whether I should “exploit” the thing I have or whether I should “explore” new things. If you want to learn how to tackle this most basic trade-off read on…
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Teach R to read handwritten Digits with just 4 Lines of Code


What is the best way for me to find out whether you are rich or poor, when the only thing I know is your address? Looking at your neighbourhood! That is the big idea behind the k-nearest neighbours (or KNN) algorithm, where k stands for the number of neighbours to look at. The idea couldn’t be any simpler yet the results are often very impressive indeed – so read on…
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Creating a Movie with Data from Outer Space in R

Source: Wikimedia

The Rosetta mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) is one of the greatest (yet underappreciated) triumphs of humankind: it was launched in 2004 and landed the spacecraft Philae ten years later on a small comet, named 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (for the whole timeline of the mission see here: Timeline of Rosetta spacecraft).

ESA provided the world with datasets of the comet which we will use to create an animated gif in R… so read on!
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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…
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