A. Background In previous posts, I covered a number of useful functions and packages for writing reusable code. I wanted to extend on that information by providing a working example of how to put together a function. In particular, I will walk through the process of generating a function that ... [Read more...]

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A. Motivation During the recent RStudio Conference, an attendee asked the panel about the lack of support provided by the tidyverse in relation to time series data. As someone who has spent the majority of their career on time series problems, this was somewhat surprising because R already has a ... [Read more...]

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In part one, I provided an initial walk through of some nice features that are available within the data.table package. In particular, we saw how to filter data and get a count of rows by the date. Let us now add a few columns to our dataset on reported ... [Read more...]

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In an older post, I discussed a number of functions that are useful for programming in R. I wanted to expand on that topic by covering other functions, packages, and tools that are useful. Over the past year, I have been working as an R programmer and these are some ... [Read more...]

For those of us who received statistical training outside of statistics departments, it often emphasized procedures over principles. This entailed that we learned about various statistical techniques and how to perform analysis in a particular statistical software, but glossed over the mechanisms and mathematical statistics underlying these practices. While that ... [Read more...]

The rms package offers a variety of tools to build and evaluate regression models in R. Originally named ‘Design’, the package accompanies the book “Regression Modeling Strategies” by Frank Harrell, which is essential reading for anyone who works in the ‘data science’ space. Over the past year or so, I ... [Read more...]

Given a data frame with multiple columns which contain time series data, let’s say that we are interested in executing an automatic forecasting algorithm on a number of columns. Furthermore, we want to train the model on a particular number of observations and assess how well they forecast future ... [Read more...]

I’ve been on a note taking binge recently. This post covers a variety of topics related to programming in R. The contents were gathered from many sources and structured in such a way that it provided the author with a useful reference guide for understanding a number of useful ... [Read more...]

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Number 1: Importing Multiple Packages Anyone who has used R for some time has written code that required the use of multiple packages. In most cases, this will be done by using the library or require function to bring in the appropriate extensions. That’s nice and gets the desired result, ... [Read more...]

The majority of my interaction with the ggplot2 package involves the interactive execution of code to visualize data within the context of exploratory data analysis. This is often a manual process and quite laborious. I recently sought to improve these tasks by creating a series of user defined functions that ... [Read more...]

This is part two of the ‘applied statistical theory’ series that will cover the bare essentials of various statistical techniques. As analysts, we need to know enough about what we’re doing to be dangerous and explain approaches to others. It’s not enough to say “I used X because ... [Read more...]

Applied statistical theory is a new series that will cover the basic methodology and framework behind various statistical procedures. As analysts, we need to know enough about what we’re doing to be dangerous and explain approaches to others. It’s not enough to say “I used X because the ... [Read more...]

Forecasting refers to the process of using statistical procedures to predict future values of a time series based on historical trends. For businesses, being able gauge expected outcomes for a given time period is essential for managing marketing, planning, and finances. For example, an advertising agency may want to utilizes ... [Read more...]

Using R Functions in Python [Read more...]