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!
Continue reading “Data Science on Rails: Analyzing Customer Churn”
In 1965 the University of Chicago rejected Kurt Vonnegut’s college thesis, which claimed that all stories shared common structures, or “shapes”, including “Man in a Hole”, “Boy gets Girl” and “Cinderella”. Many years later the then already legendary Vonnegut gave a hilarious lecture on this idea – before continuing to read on please watch it here (about 4 minutes):
Continue reading “Extracting Basic Plots from Novels: Dracula is a Man in a Hole”
By now you will know that it is a good tradition of this blog to explain stuff by rebuilding toy examples of it in R (see e.g. Understanding the Maths of Computed Tomography (CT) scans, So, what is AI really? or Google’s Eigenvector… or how a Random Surfer finds the most relevant Webpages). This time we will do the same for the hyped Blockchain technology, so read on!
Continue reading “Understanding Blockchain Technology by building one in R”
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!
Continue reading “Finding free Science Books from Springer”
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!
Continue reading “Cambridge Analytica: Microtargeting or How to catch voters with the LASSO”
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…
Continue reading “Learning Data Science: The Supermarket Knows You are Pregnant Before Your Dad does!”
It was November last year when I seriously started blogging and it is time to share with you some experiences and highlights before the summer break… so read on!
Continue reading “Summer Break: A Look back… and ahead”
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…
Continue reading “Learning Data Science: Understanding and Using k-means Clustering”
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…
Continue reading “Reinforcement Learning: Life is a Maze”
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…
Continue reading “Teach R to read handwritten Digits with just 4 Lines of Code”
