Menu Home

How Much Data Do You Need?

Introduction A common question in analytics, statistics, and data science projects is: how much data do you need? This question actually has very specific and clear answers! A first good answer is “it is good to have a lot.” Let’s dig deeper and get some additional more detailed quantitative answers. […]

Thinking About Linear Regression

Introduction I want to spend some time thinking out loud about linear regression. As a data science consultant and teacher I spend a lot of time using linear regression and teaching linear regression. I have found each of these pursuits can degenerate into mere doctrine or instructions. “do this,” “expect […]

Why R?

I was working with our copy editor on Appendix A of Practical Data Science with R, 2nd Edition; Zumel, Mount; Manning 2019, and ran into this little point (unfortunately) buried in the back of the book. In our opinion the R ecosystem is the fastest path to substantial data science, […]

What is vtreat?

vtreat is a DataFrame processor/conditioner that prepares real-world data for supervised machine learning or predictive modeling in a statistically sound manner. vtreat takes an input DataFrame that has a specified column called “the outcome variable” (or “y”) that is the quantity to be predicted (and must not have missing values). […]

Speaking at BARUG

We will be speaking at the Tuesday, September 3, 2019 BARUG. If you are in the Bay Area, please come see us. Nina Zumel & John Mount Practical Data Science with R Practical Data Science with R (Zumel and Mount) was one of the first, and most widely-read books on […]