Every programmer should have an opinion on what the outcomes of the expressions like “5” == 5 should be, and perhaps even a guess as to what the answer is in their most familiar programming language. In my opinion SQL gets it right. For example, we get the following in […]
I’d like to work an example of using SQL WITH Common Table Expressions to produce more legible SQL.
Continuing (and hopefully ending) our quick series on software pathologies I would like to follow-up The Hyper Dance with “Rule 42 Software.”
I’d like to share a new talk on bilingual data science. It is limited to R and Python, so it is a bit of a “we play all kinds of music, both Country and Western.” It has what I feel is a really neat example how I used Jetbrains Intellij […]
There is much ado about variable selection or variable utility valuation in supervised machine learning. In this note we will try to disarm some possibly common fallacies, and to set reasonable expectations about how variable valuation can work. Introduction In general variable valuation is estimating the utility that a column […]
A lot of machine learning, statistical, plotting, and analytics algorithms over-sell a small evil trick I call “the hyper dance.”
Why a mere accurate classification rule may not meet your business needs. And why you should insist on a model that returns numeric scores for classification problems. (link)
Let’s please stop saying somebody isn’t a data scientist if they haven’t memorized the innards of one obscure machine learning algorithm, or blow the right smoke during an interoo (“Kangaroo interview”, thanks Jim Ruppert for this term!). Let us, instead, think of the data scientist as the bus driver. It […]
In addition to adding a base-R pipe it appears a new base-R function builders is in the works (in addition to “function”). R is a very versatile language, with a great ability to accept user-level or package extensions. What I mean by this is, user code and package code (which […]
R‘s upcoming pipe appears to be currently proposed as a syntactic transform of the form: a |> f(…) -> f(a, …) a |> f() -> f(a) There is a current active discussion on this prototype and some interesting points come up. Note the current proposal appears to disallow a |> […]