Hello, everyone! I’ve been meaning to get a new blog post out for the past couple of weeks. During that time I’ve been messing around with clustering. Clustering, or cluster analysis, is a method of data mining that groups similar observations together. Classification and clustering are quite alike, ...

In my last post Which linear model is best? I wrote about using stepwise selection as a method for selecting linear models, which turns out to have some issues (see this article, and Wikipedia). This post will be about two methods that slightly modify ordinary least squares (OLS) regression – ridge ...

Recently I have been working on a Kaggle competition where participants are tasked with predicting Russian housing prices. In developing a model for the challenge, I came across a few methods for selecting the best regression model for a given dataset. Let’s load up some data and take a ...

In real estate, spatial data is the name of the game. Countless other domains utilize the power of this data, which is becoming more prevalent by the day. In this post I will go over a few simple, but powerful tools to get you started using using geographic information in ...

  While finishing up with R-rockstar Hadley Wickham’s book (Free Book – R for Data Science), the section on model building elaborates on something pretty cool that I had no idea about – list columns. Most of us have probably seen the following data frame column format: df

What is my home worth?  Many homeowners in America ask themselves this question, and many have an answer.  What does the market think, though?  The best way to estimate a property’s value is by looking at other, similar properties that have sold recently in the same area – the comparable ...

During my Monday morning ritual of avoiding work,  I found this publication that is written in R, for people who use R – R Weekly.  The authors do a pretty awesome job of aggregating useful, entertaining, and informative content about what’s happening surrounding our favorite programming language.  Check it out, ...

My day job as a real estate agent requires a myriad of skills, ranging from accounting to negotiation to business analysis.  Frequently (about every three months) I whip out my marketing skills to advertise my business.  This time I decided to send out postcards to an entire neighborhood in which ...