Articles by Philipp Probst

Automatising R-Markdown

December 1, 2023 | Philipp Probst

In this blog post I will explain how you can automatise the creation of R-Markdown documents. My main motivation for this was that I had a document where I had to create an R Markdown with several very similar sections. Of course I could write each section with new code, ...
[Read more...]

Welcome To My Blog

November 30, 2023 | Philipp Probst

This is the first post in my new Quarto blog. Welcome! I followed this instruction to create my new Quarto blog: https://quarto.org/docs/websites/website-blog.html Quarto is much more flexible and plays very well with R-Markdown documents. That’s...
[Read more...]

Shiny: Fast Data Loading with fst

March 21, 2022 | Philipp Probst

I had several projects where I had to load in a big dataset for my shiny app. This loading was usually done in the beginning and would take more than 3 minutes. My target was to reduce this time. I starting thinking about the problem and discovered, that not the whole ... [Read more...]

Guidelines for writing good R code

February 1, 2022 | Philipp Probst

These guidelines are recommendations and are not meant to be obligatory. Many of the principles are useful and help working and collaborating more efficiently with R. Feel free to add your recommendations or remarks in the discussion section below. [Read more...]

Is catboost the best gradient boosting R package?

July 7, 2020 | Philipp Probst

Several R packages that use different methods are out there for using gradient boosting methods. The three most famous ones are currently xgboost, catboost and lightgbm. I want to compare these three to find out which is the best one in their default mode without tuning. These algorithms are not ... [Read more...]

New xgboost defaults

February 25, 2020 | Philipp Probst

xgboost is the most famous R package for gradient boosting and it is since long time on the market. In one of my publications, I created a framework for providing defaults (and tunability measures) and one of the packages that I used there was xgboost. The results provided a default ... [Read more...]

mlr vs. caret

November 8, 2018 | Philipp Probst

Let’s compare the two popular R packages for machine learning mlr and caret. caret is longer on the market, its first CRAN release seems to be from 2007, while mlr came to CRAN on 2013. As for now, caret seems to be more popular, according to cranlogs caret was downloaded 178029 times ... [Read more...]

Tuning random forest

November 22, 2017 | Philipp Probst

Random forest is one of the standard approaches for supervised learning nowadays. One of its advantages is that it does not require tuning of the hyperparameters to perform good. But is that really true? Maybe we are not only interested in a good model but in the best model we ... [Read more...]

Update on Random Forest Package Downloads

April 9, 2017 | Philipp Probst

I just updated the code from a previous post where I analysed the download statistics of different random forest packages in R, see the code at the bottom of the article. I calculated the number of cran downloads in march 2016 and march 2017. Standard random forest The number of download of ... [Read more...]