Between writing up my thesis, applying to jobs hire me! I’m quite good at programming, and the ongoing pandemic, I don’t really have time to write full blogposts. I have however decided to brush up my python skills and dive headfirst into Julia. As ... [Read more...]

#for working with polygons
library(sf)
library(sfheaders)

library(tidyverse)
library(gtools)

set.seed(22081992)

Riddler Express This weeks express deals with an erratic driver: In Riddler City, the city streets follow a grid layout, running north-south and east-west. You’re driving north when you decide to play a little game. Every time you reach an intersection, you randomly turn left or right, each ... [Read more...]

Every Tuesday, the R4DataScience community posts a dataset online as part of #TidyTuesday as practice wrangling and modelling data. For the week of 5th May 2020, the dataset concerned the video game Animal Crossing. Intro Radiohead - How I Made My Millions I don’t play Animal Crossing (unfortunately Nintendo ... [Read more...]

I wrote this one pretty quickly compared to part 1 (which goes much deeper into mathematical concepts), and only realized after how much of a similarity it has to many of Ben Torvaney’s posts on the subject. This probably isn’t a coincidence given how much I’ve used his ... [Read more...]

One of the most consistent fonts of posts on this blog is The Guardian’s football trivia page The Knowledge. A particular reason for this is that the small contained questions lend themselves to small blogposts that I can turn around in an hour or two, as opposed to being ... [Read more...]

I’m extremely biased, but to me, one of the real success* stories in neuroscience over the last (just over) two decades has been in studying reward signals. Since the seminal 1997 paper, a lot of work has gone into figuring out how the brain assigns value to outcomes. *ugh, maybe. ... [Read more...]

In my free time away from PhD and data science work, I (used to) enjoy rowing. Aside from obvious benefits like socialising, providing a (very intense) workout, seeing the outdoors at least a few times a week… there are really two things that I love(d) about rowing: It’s ... [Read more...]

Most Wednesday’s I enjoy reading The Knowledge blog on the Guardian’s website and reading the football trivia therein. When time (and questions) allow, I like to answer some of the questions posed, example of which are here, here, and here. League of Nations The first question comes from ... [Read more...]

For a recent blogpost, I required data on the ELO ratings of national football teams over time. Such a list exists online at eloratings.net and so in theory this was just a simple task for rvest to read the html pages on that site and then fish out the ... [Read more...]

For anyone watching football, being able to predict matches is a key aspect of the hobby. Whether explicitly (e.g. when betting on matches, or deciding on recruitment for an upcoming season), or more implicitly when discussing favourites to win the league in the pub, almost all discussion of the ... [Read more...]

Riddler Classic In my spare time I enjoy solving 538’s The Riddler column. This week I had a spare few hours waiting for the Superbowl to start and decided to code up a solution to the latest problem to keep me busy. The question revolves around a card game in ... [Read more...]

Every so often a question on The Guardian’s The Knowledge football trivia section piques my interest and is amenable to analysis using R. Previously, I looked at club name suffixes and young World Cup winners last August. This week (give or take), a question posed on twitter caught my ... [Read more...]

The Guardian publish a weekly set of questions and answers on a variety of football minutiae at The Knowledge. Forutnately, some of these are extremely tractable using R, so I thought I’d have a go at working through the archives to see if I can shed light on any ... [Read more...]

Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? I published the complete code for that article ... [Read more...]

Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? This is the complete script for an short ... [Read more...]

Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? This is the complete script for an short ... [Read more...]

Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? This is the complete script for an short ... [Read more...]

Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? This is the complete script for an short ... [Read more...]

Recently, a Yorkshire national football team appeared in a league of national teams for stateless people. This got me wondering how the historic counties of the UK would do at the world cup. Could any of them compete with full international teams? This is the complete script for an short ... [Read more...]