Introduction Combining principal component analysis (PCA) and kmeans clustering seems to be a pretty popular 1-2 punch in data science. While there is some debate about whether combining dimensionality reduction and clustering is something we should...

Introduction Arguing about domestic league strength is something that soccer fans seems to never tire of. (“Could Messi do it on a cold rainy night in Stoke?”) Many of these conversations are anecdotal, leading to “hot takes” that are unfalsifiabl...

Introduction Every year I play in several fantasy football (American) leagues. For those who are unaware, it’s a game that occurs every year in sync with the National Football League (NFL) where participants play in weekly head-to-head games a...

While reading up on modern soccer analytics (I’ve had an itch for soccer and tracking data recently, I stumbled upon an excellent set of tutorials written by Devin Pleuler. In particular, his notebook on non-negative matrix factorization (NNMF)...

Intro There’s never been a better time to be involved in sports analytics. There is a wealth of open-sourced data and code (not to mention well-researched and public analysis) to digest and use. Both people working for teams and people just do...

I’ve been doing some machine learning recently, and one thing that keeps popping up is the need to explain the models and their components. There are a variety of ways to go about explaining model features, but probably the most common approach is to use variable (or feature) importance ...

As I mentioned back in July, I haven’t had as much time (since summer of 2018) to write due to taking classes in pursuit of a degree from Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Science in Analytics (OMSA) program. On the other hand, the classes have given me some ideas ...

Unfortunately, I haven’t had as much time to make blog posts in the past year or so. I started taking classes as part of Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Science in Analytics (OMSA) program last summer (2018) while continuing to work full-time, so extra time to code and write ...

Some Context Those of you non-academia folk who work in industry (like me) are probably conscious of any/all periodic reports that an independent entity publishes for your company’s industry. For example, in the insurance industry in the United States, the Federal Insurance Office of the U.S. Department ...

To be honest, I planned on writing a review of this past weekend’s rstudio::conf 2019, but several other people have already done a great job of doing that—just check out Karl Broman’s aggregation of reviews at the bottom of the page here! (More on this in a ...

I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in the {tidyverse} Developer Day the day after rstudio::conf2019 officially wrapped up. 1One of the objectives of the event was to encourage open-source contributor newbies (like me ????) to gain some experience, namely through submitting pull requests to address issues with {tidyverse} packages. ...

Introduction I’ve written some “tutorial”-like content recently—see here, here, and here—but I’ve been lacking on ideas for “original” content since then. With that said, I thought it would to try to re-create something with R. (Not too long ago I saw that Andrew Heiss did ...

Introduction Much discussion in the R community has revolved around the proper way to implement the “split-apply-combine”. In particular, I love the exploration of this topic in this blog post. It seems that the “preferred” approach is dplyr::group_by() + tidyr::nest() for splitting, dplyr::mutate() + purrr::map() for applying, ...

Two awesome things inspired this post: {ggplot2}’s version 3.0 release on CRAN, including full support for the {sf} package and new functions geom_sf() and coord_sf(), which make plotting data from shapefiles very straightforward. Jonas Scholey’s blog post discussing the use of “bubble grid” maps as an alternative ...

Introduction I wanted to do a follow-up on my series of posts about Texas high school University Interscholastic League (UIL) academic competitions to more closely evaluate the relationship between the school performance in those competitions with school-wide SAT) and ACT scores. For those who may not be familiar with these ...

Competition Participation Some of the first questions that might come to mind are those regarding the number of schools in each level of competition (District, Region, and State) and each conference classification level (1A, 2A, … 6A). It seems fair to say that the distribution of schools among Districts, Regions, and ...