In the first chapter Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers he discusses how in Canadian Junior Hockey there is a higher likelihood for players to be born in the first quarter of the year. In his words: Because these kids are older within their year they make all the important teams at ...

The 9th episode of the 2nd Season of Ted Lasso is an episode called “Beard After Hours” which I found to be a pretty bad episode on a pretty good show. I wondered whether others found this to be an unexpectedly bad episode of TV or if it was just ...

While writing my posts about COVID’s effect on NYC Subway ridership the New York Times published an article called The Pandemic Wasn’t Supposed to Hurt New York Transit This Much. The article states: I believe the 80% target by 2026 comes from a McKinsey study. While I don’t know ...

In my prior post I used forecasting to look at the effect of COVID on the expected amount of New York City subway swipes. In this post I will drill a level deeper to run forecasts for various types of subway fares to see if any particularly type has recovered ...

With things in NYC beginning to return to normal after two years of COVID I found myself thinking about how much money was lost in Subway fares in the 2+ years where people were working from home. Seeing an opportunity to mess around with some forecasting packages, I set out to ...

In this fourth (and hopefully final) entry in my “Icing the Kicker” series of posts, I’m going to jump back to the first post where I used tidymodels to predict whether or not a kick attempt would be iced. However, this time I see if using the h2o ...

In my last post I looked at the causal effect of icing the kicker using weighting. Those results found that icing the kicker had a non-significant effect on the success of the field goal attempt with a point estimate of -2.82% (CI: -5.88%, 0.50%). In this post I will explore two ...

In my prior post I looked at when coaches were most likly to ice a kicker where ‘icing a kicker’ means for a defense to call a timeout right before the offense is about to kick a field goal. In this post, I’ll be looking to apply causal inference ...

I’m constantly on the lookout for things I can use for future posts for this blog. My goal is usually two-fold. First, what is a tool or technique I want to try/learn and second is there an interesting data set that I can use with those tools. I’...

In my previous post I looked at College Football Non-Conference games to create a network map overlaid on top of the United States using the {ggraph} package. In this post I’ll be extending that to examine Conference Realignment, which is when colleges change from one conference to the next. ...

We’re in the middle of College Football’s bowl post-season and I’d been wanting to do a more in-depth post on networks using {tidygraph} and {ggraph} for a while. So now seemed like as good a time as any to explore some College Football data. I had used {...

I love movies. I enjoy watching them, I enjoy reading about the industry (sometimes), and as a bit of a data-nerd (exhibit a: my blog), I enjoy learning about the outliers in the industry. One of my favorite trends to follow is the shifting dynamics of Hollywood being driven more ...

Since 1998, MTV’s The Challenge (formerly the Real World/Road Rules Challenge) has graced the airwaves where it is currently in Season 37. In a prior post I had mentioned that this is one of my guilty pleasure shows so this will likely not be the last post that is based ...

Introduction Between January 13th and January 27th, 2021 the stock price for Gamestop (GME) rose 10x from $31 to $347 dollars. This rise was in part due to increased popularity on the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets looking to create a short squeeze and because they “liked the stock”. This rapid rise also drew ...

I’m a big proponent of enabling the reading time option on this blog which uses Hugo’s academic theme. I always appreciate seeing it on other blogs so I know how much time to invest in the post. I also like it because its a feedback mechanism for me ...

On July 4th, 2020, I posted the first article to this humble R blog as a small hobby to do something new while working from home through COVID. Very recently, this blog celebrated its first year and I wanted to leverage Google Analytics to do a look back at the last ...

In the beginning of May, I used RSelenium to scrape the Google Play Store reviews for Instagram Lite to demonstrate how the package can be used to automate browser behavior. Its taken longer than I had initially planned to do this follow-up on the analysis of that data. But better ...

During COVID I’ve started watching some older “classic” movies that I hadn’t seen before but felt for whatever reason I should have seen as a movie fan. Last week, I had watched The Third Man after listening to a podcast about Spy Movies. After watching it I was ...

When Normal Web Scraping Just Won’t Work I’ve used rvest in numerous posts to scrape information from static websites or through forms to get data. However, some websites don’t have static data that can be downloaded by just scraping the HTML. Google Play Store reviews are one ...

In a previous post I created a cool-looking (in my opinion) heatmap of my Marathon training from years back. One of the downsides to that density-based method of making the heat map was that routes I only ran once didn’t show up very clearly. I also wanted to know ...