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I’m back!  6 months after my second child was born, I’ve finally made it back to my blog with something fun to write about.  I recently read through the excellent Machine Learning with R ebook and was impressed by the caret … Continue reading → [Read more...]

When I started keeping this Blog, my intent was to write about and keep helpful snippets of R code that I used in the line of work.  It was the start of my second job after grad school and I … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I recently downloaded a very cool dataset on Ontario libraries from the Ontario Open Data Catalogue.  The dataset contains 142 columns of information describing 386 libraries in Ontario, representing a fantastically massive data collection effort for such important cultural institutions (although … Continue reading → [Read more...]

A few months ago, I saw a link on twitter to an awesome graph charting the similarities of different foods based on their flavour compounds, in addition to their prevalence in recipes (see the whole study, The Flavor Network and the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Apart from going longer than I had anticipated, very little of any significance went wrong during my R session at UofT on friday!  It took a while at the beginning for everyone to get set up.  Everyone was connecting to … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I was chatting about public speaking with my brother, who is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Pharmacy at UofT, when he offered me the opportunity to come to his class and teach about R.  Always eager to spread the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Thanks to Ontario Open Data, a survey dataset was recently made public containing peoples’ responses to questions about Ontario’s Long Term Energy Plan (LTEP).  The survey did fairly well in terms of raw response numbers, with 7,889 responses in total … Continue reading → [Read more...]

After posting my analysis of the Enron email corpus, I realized that the regex patterns I set up to capture and filter out the cautionary/privacy messages at the bottoms of peoples emails were not working.  Let’s have a look at … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Having only ever played with Latent Dirichlet Allocation using gensim in python, I was very interested to see a nice example of this kind of topic modelling in R.  Whenever I see a really cool analysis done, I get the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

…dary!  Or, as you’ll see below, when did it become slightly less legendary?  The analysis in this post was inspired by DiffusePrioR’s analysis of when The Simpsons became less Cromulent. When I read his post a while back, I thought … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Before my daughter was born, I thought that my wife and I would have to send her to a licensed child care centre somewhere in Toronto.  I had heard over and over how long of a waiting list I should … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I found a fun survey released to the Toronto Open Data website that investigates the travel/commuting behaviour of Torontonians, but with a special focus on E-bikes.  When I opened up the file, I found various demographic information, in addition to a … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I’ve written previously about how the apply function is a major workhorse in many of my work projects. What I didn’t know is how handy the sapply function can be! There are a couple of cases so far where I’ve … Continue reading → [Read more...]

This will be a quick one.  I was trying to sort my dataframe so that it went in ascending order on one variable and descending order on another variable.  This was really REALLY bothersome to try to figure out with … Continue reading → [Read more...]

In my last post, I wrote about how I compiled a US Social Security Agency data set into something usable in R, and mentioned some issues scaling it up to be usable for bigger datasets.  I also mentioned the need … Continue reading → [Read more...]