I recently encountered a 2018 paper called “The next-generation \(k\)-means algorithm”. It proposes and compiles advancements and theoretical justifications for \(k\)-means and \(k\)-medians clustering. One part that caught my eye was the p...

The magrittr package is a part of the extended tidyverse – i.e., not one of the ones normally loaded. It is the one that supplies the pipe operator (%__%), but it turns out that the package actually contains four pipe operators in total. All ar...

Partial regression plots – also called added variable plots, among other things – are a type of diagnostic plot for multivariate linear regression models. More specifically, they attempt to show the effect of adding a new variable to an exi...

There are plenty of methods to choose from for classification problems, all with their own strengths and weaknesses. This post will try to compare three of the more basic ones: linear discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), ...

The t-test is a common, reliable way to check for differences between two samples. When dealing with multivariate data, one can simply run t-tests on each variable and see if there are differences. This could lead to scenarios where individual t-tests ...

As with most useful (collections of) libraries, the tidyverse has a lot to offer. One interesting bit that I found recently was the accumulate() function in the purrr library, which allows you to apply a function over a succession of values in a vector. This post is a quick example ...

This is a follow up to the previous post, where the mechanics of making cross-playlist predictions were covered. This post covers the second half of the project: now that we have the analysis method and the important functions worked out in practice, we need to code this functionality into a ...

This is the first of probably two posts detailing the construction of an RShiny app. The app in question is meant to take data from two Spotify playlists, make recommendations for tracks from one – which I’ll call the “target” playlist – based on the contents of another – the “reference” playlist. ...

This is a quick example regarding the ggtext package. It’s one of the many packages that extends ggplot2, with this one having a focus on adding and formatting text in graphs. The particularly interesting thing for me is that it allows Markdown and other formatting of the labels in ...

I’ve seen a number of examples of MCMC algorithms, and while they’re all solid, a lot of them tend to be a bit too neat - they have a fairly simple model, a single predictor (maybe two), and not much else. This one is a good example, as ...

Inspired by this post, which tries to calculate streaks in Python’s pandas library, I thought I’d give it a try in R, since it’s all just dataframe operations in the Python post. I won’t repeat his analysis, but I will replicate the streak determination and some ...

This problem was the Riddler Classic on 538 for May 15, 2020. The problem is as follows: The fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons introduced a system of “advantage and disadvantage.” When you roll a die “with advantage,” you roll the die twice and keep the higher result. Rolling “with disadvantage” is similar, except ...

Among all probability distributions, the normal distribution is probably the most well-established and well-characterized. The importance of things like the central limit theorem and the normality assumptions in linear regression highlight it well. One of the more interesting ones is the fact that you can approximate a binomial distribution with ...

Bayesian statistics is centered on constructing certain assumptions about how the probability of an event is distributed, and then adjusting that belief as new information comes in. It can be more involved to construct a Bayesian model as opposed to the “look at many things in aggregate” approach used in ...

First broadcast in 1988, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is a television show whose nominal story involves a guy being trapped in space by a couple of mad scientist types…which is actually just an excuse to have a few guys make fun of really, really bad movies. This raises a few unusual ...