Introduction My last blog post in 2016 on SQL Server 2016….. Some years ago, I have heard predictions from ‘experts‘ that within a few years Hadoop / Spark systems would take over traditional RDBMS’s like SQL Server. I don’t think … Continue reading →

Introduction A few days ago Microsoft announced their new Microsoft R Server 9.0 version. Among a lot of new things, it includes some new and improved machine learning algorithms in their MicrosoftML package. Fast linear learner, with support for L1 … Continue reading →

Introduction Many people know that nasty feeling when buying a brand new car. The minute that you have left the dealer, your car has lost a substantial amount of value. Unfortunately this depreciation is inevitable, however, the amount depends heavily … Continue reading →

H2O has recently released its steam AI engine, a fully open source engine that support the management and deployment of machine learning models. Both H2O on R and H2O steam are easy to set up and use. And both complement each … Continue reading →

Introduction Although more than 20 years old, Market Basket Analysis (MBA) (or association rules mining) can still be a very useful technique to gain insights in large transactional data sets. The classical example is transactional data in a supermarket. For … Continue reading →

Introduction Some time ago I had the honor to follow an interesting talk from Tijmen Blankevoort on neural networks and deeplearning. Convolutional and recurrent neural networks were topics that already caught my interest and this talk inspired me to dive into … Continue reading →

Introduction In just a few weeks the Eurovision 2016 song contest will be held again. There are 43 participants, two semi-finals on the 10th and 12th of May and a final on the 14th of May. It’s going to be a … Continue reading →

I almost never travel by train, the last time was years ago. However, recently I had to take the train from Amsterdam and it was delayed for 5 minutes. No big deal, but I was just curious how often these … Continue reading →

Introduction In my previous blog post I used the Microsoft Translator API in my BonAppetit Shiny app to recommend restaurants to tourists. I’m getting a little bit addicted to the Microsoft API’s, they can be fun to use :-). In … Continue reading →

Introduction More and more tourists are visiting The Netherlands, this will become very clear if you walk through the center of Amsterdam on a sunny day. All those tourists need to eat somewhere, in some restaurant. You can see their … Continue reading →

Introduction H2O is a fast and scalable opensource machine learning platform. Several algorithms are available, for example neural networks, random forests, linear models and gradient boosting. See the complete list here. Recently the H2O world conference was held, unfortunately I … Continue reading →

Recently the R package visNetwork was brought to my attention. It is an R interface to the ‘vis.js’ JavaScript charting library where you can create interactive network graphs. To try out the package I need some data, luckily I still have some … Continue reading →

Recently Microsoft released the AzureML R package, it allows R users to publish their R models (or any R function) as a web service on the Microsoft Azure Machine Learning platform. Of course, I wanted to test the new package, … Continue reading →

Sorry for the local nature of this blog post. I was watching Dutch television and zapping between channels the other day and I stumbled upon “Goede Tijden Slechte Tijden” (GTST). This is a Dutch soap series broadcast by RTL Nederland. … Continue reading →

A long time ago in 1991 I had my first programming course (Modula 2) at the Vrije University in Amsterdam. I spend months behind a terminal with a green monochrome display doing the programming exercises using VI. Do you remeber Shift … Continue reading →

Last month I visited my favorite Chinese restaurant with some friends in the center of Amsterdam, Golden chopsticks, and had some nice food. I was wondering if other people shared the same opinion. So I visited iens.nl, a Dutch restaurant … Continue reading →

Some time ago I was at a party, inevitably, a question that came up was: “Longhow what kind of work are you doing?” I answered: I am a data scientist I have the most sexy job, do you want me … Continue reading →