I’ll admit it: I have been wrong about statistics. However, that isn’t what this article is about. This article is less about some of the statistical mistakes I have made, as a mere working data scientist, and more of a rant about the hectoring tone of corrections from some statisticians […]
Win-Vector LLC’s Nina Zumel and John Mount are proud to announce their new data science video course Introduction to Data Science is now available on Udemy.
The Facebook data science blog shared some fun data explorations this Valentine’s Day in Carlos Greg Diuk’s “The Formation of Love”. They are rightly receiving positive interest in and positive reviews of their work (for example Robinson Meyer’s Atlantic article). The finding is also a great opportunity to discuss the […]
Nina Zumel and I ( John Mount ) have been working very hard on producing an exciting new book called “Practical Data Science with R.” The book has now entered Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) which allows you to subscribe to chapters as they become available and give us feedback […]
A fair complaint when seeing yet another “data science” article is to say: “this is just medical statistics” or “this is already part of bioinformatics.” We certainly label many articles as “data science” on this blog. Probably the complaint is slightly cleaner if phrased as “this is already known statistics.” […]
Given the range of wants, diverse data sources, required innovation and methods it often feels like data science projects are immune to planning, scoping and tracking. Without a system to break a data science project into smaller observable components you greatly increase your risk of failure. As a followup to […]
A bit more on the ROC/AUC The issue The receiver operating characteristic curve (or ROC) is one of the standard methods to evaluate a scoring system. Nina Zumel has described its application, but I would like to call out some additional details. In my opinion while the ROC is a […]
Model level fit summaries can be tricky in R. A quick read of model fit summary data for factor levels can be misleading. We describe the issue and demonstrate techniques for dealing with them.
One of the shortcomings of regression (both linear and logistic) is that it doesn’t handle categorical variables with a very large number of possible values (for example, postal codes). You can get around this, of course, by going to another modeling technique, such as Naive Bayes; however, you lose some […]
The design of the statistical programming language R sits in a slightly uncomfortable place between the functional programming and object oriented paradigms. The upside is you get a lot of the expressive power of both programming paradigms. A downside of this is: the not always useful variability of the language’s […]