In our previous note we demonstrated Y-Aware PCA and other y-aware approaches to dimensionality reduction in a predictive modeling context, specifically Principal Components Regression (PCR). For our examples, we selected the appropriate number of principal components by eye. In this note, we will look at ways to select the appropriate ...

In our previous note, we discussed some problems that can arise when using standard principal components analysis (specifically, principal components regression) to model the relationship between independent (x) and dependent (y) variables. In this note, we present some dimensionality reduction techniques that alleviate some of those problems, in particular what ...

In this note, we discuss principal components regression and some of the issues with it: The need for scaling. The need for pruning. The lack of “y-awareness” of the standard dimensionality reduction step. The purpose of this article is to set the stage for presenting dimensionality reduction techniques appropriate for ...

One of the trickier tasks in clustering is determining the appropriate number of clusters. Domain-specific knowledge is always best, when you have it, but there are a number of heuristics for getting at the likely number of clusters in your data. We cover a few of them in Chapter 8 (available ...

The combination of R plus SQL offers an attractive way to work with what we call medium-scale data: data that’s perhaps too large to gracefully work with in its entirety within your favorite desktop analysis tool (whether that be R or Excel), but too small to justify the overhead ...

We’ve just finished off a series of articles on some recent research results applying differential privacy to improve machine learning. Some of these results are pretty technical, so we thought it was worth working through concrete examples. And some of the original results are locked behind academic journal paywalls, ...

Differential privacy was originally developed to facilitate secure analysis over sensitive data, with mixed success. It’s back in the news again now, with exciting results from Cynthia Dwork, et. al. (see references at the end of the article) that apply results from differential privacy to machine learning. In this ...

Authors: John Mount (more articles) and Nina Zumel (more articles). Our four part article series collected into one piece. Part 1: The problem Part 2: In-training set measures Part 3: Out of sample procedures Part 4: Cross-validation techniques “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” George Box Here’s a caricature of ...

Illustration from Project Gutenberg The goal of cluster analysis is to group the observations in the data into clusters such that every datum in a cluster is more similar to other datums in the same cluster than it is to datums in other clusters. This is an analysis method of ...