Learning R: A gentle introduction to higher-order functions


Have you ever thought about why the definition of a function in R is different from many other programming languages? The part that causes the biggest difficulties (especially for beginners of R) is that you state the name of the function at the beginning and use the assignment operator – as if functions were like any other data type, like vectors, matrices or data frames…
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Intuition for Principal Component Analysis (PCA)


Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a dimension-reduction method that can be used to reduce a large set of (often correlated) variables into a smaller set of (uncorrelated) variables, called principal components, which still contain most of the information.

PCA is a concept that is traditionally hard to grasp so instead of giving you the n’th mathematical derivation I will provide you with some intuition.
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Why R for Data Science – and not Python?


There are literally hundreds of programming languages out there, e.g. the whole alphabet of one letter programming languages is taken. In the area of data science, there are two big contenders: R and Python. Now, why is this blog about R and not Python?
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OneR – Fascinating Insights through Simple Rules


We already saw the power of the OneR package in the preceding post, One Rule (OneR) Machine Learning Classification in under One Minute. Here we want to give some more examples to gain some fascinating, often counter-intuitive, insights.
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