When using R markdown in RStudio, I like to insert a new chunk using the shortcut Cmd+Option+I. Unfortunately I often press a key instead of “I” and end up folding all the chunks, getting something like this: It often takes … Continue reading →

Visualizing the relationship between multiple variables can get messy very quickly. This post is about how the ggpairs() function in the GGally package does this task, as well as my own method for visualizing pairwise relationships when all the variables … Continue reading →

I was recently working on a supervised learning problem (i.e. building a model using some features to predict some response variable) with a fairly large dataset. I used base R’s plot and hist functions for exploratory data analysis and all … Continue reading →

I recently learned how to use the choroplethr package through a short tutorial by the package author Ari Lamstein (youtube link here). To cement what I learned, I thought I would use this package to visualize flood insurance claims. I … Continue reading →

Gaussian processes are a widely employed statistical tool because of their flexibility and computational tractability. (For instance, one recent area where Gaussian processes are used is in machine learning for hyperparameter optimization.) A stochastic process is a Gaussian process if … Continue reading →

In this previous post, I explored the probability that a team wins a best-of-n series, given that its win probability for any one game is some constant . As one commenter pointed out, most sports models consider the home team … Continue reading →

The NBA playoffs are in full swing! A total of 16 teams are competing in a playoff-format competition, with the winner of each best-of-7 series moving on to the next round. In each matchup, two teams play 7 basketball games … Continue reading →

John Cook recently wrote an interesting blog post on random vectors and random projections. In the post, he states two surprising facts of high-dimensional geometry and gives some intuition for the second fact. In this post, I will provide R … Continue reading →

This month’s issue of Significance magazine has a very nice summary article of the sinh-arcsinh normal distribution. (Unfortunately, the article seems to be behind a paywall.) This distribution was first introduced by Chris Jones and Arthur Pewsey in 2009 as … Continue reading →

Once in a while, you might find yourself wanting to embed one plot within another plot. ggplot2 makes this really easy with the annotation_custom function. The following example illustrates how you can achieve this. (For all the code in one … Continue reading →

Quantile regression: what is it? Let be some response variable of interest, and let be a vector of features or predictors that we want to use to model the response. In linear regression, we are trying to estimate the conditional … Continue reading →

I’m excited to announce that my first package has been accepted to CRAN! The package pcLasso implements principal components lasso, a new method for sparse regression which I’ve developed with Rob Tibshirani and Jerry Friedman. In this post, I will … Continue reading →

I’m writing a series of posts on various function options of the glmnet function (from the package of the same name), hoping to give more detail and insight beyond R’s documentation. In this post, we will look at the offset … Continue reading →

Recently I wanted to learn how to use emojis as points in a scatterplot points. It seems like the emojifont package is a popular way to do it. However, I couldn’t seem to get it to work on my machine … Continue reading →

In this previous post, I showed how one can scrape top-level NBA game data from BasketballReference.com. In the post after that, I demonstrated how to scrape play-by-play data for one game. After writing those posts, I thought to myself: why … Continue reading →

For each NBA game, nba.com has a really nice graphic which tracks the point differential between the two teams throughout the game. Here is the lead tracker graphic for the game between the LA Clippers and the Phoenix Suns on … Continue reading →

I’m a casual NBA fan: I don’t have time to watch the games but enjoy viewing the highlights on Instagram/Youtube (especially Shaqtin’ A Fool!); I sometimes read game articles and analyses (e.g. Blogtable). Apart from the game being an amazing … Continue reading →