I have written the following post about Predictive Maintenance and flexdashboard at my company codecentric’s blog: Predictive Maintenance is an increasingly popular strategy associated with Industry 4.0; it uses advanced analytics and machine lea...

Yesterday and today I attended the data2day, a conference about Big Data, Machine Learning and Data Science in Heidelberg, Germany. Topics and workshops covered a range of topics surrounding (big) data analysis and Machine Learning, like Deep Learnin...

Today, I have given a webinar for the Applied Epidemiology Didactic of the University of Wisconsin - Madison titled “From Biology to Industry. A Blogger’s Journey to Data Science.” I talked about how blogging about R and Data Science helped me b...

I have written the following post about Data Science for Fraud Detection at my company codecentric’s blog: Fraud can be defined as “the crime of getting money by deceiving people” (Cambridge Dictionary); it is as old as humanity: whenever two...

GitHub vs. GitLab Git is a distributed implementation of version control. Many people have written very eloquently about why it is a good idea to use version control, not only if you collaborate in a team but also if you work on your own; one example ...

I have written the following post about Social Network Analysis and Topic Modeling of codecentric’€™s Twitter friends and followers for codecentric’s blog: Recently, Matthias Radtke has written a very nice blog post on Topic Modeling of the c...

One of the many great packages of rOpenSci has implemented the open source engine Tesseract. Optical character recognition (OCR) is used to digitize written or typed documents, i.e. photos or scans of text documents are “translated” into a digital...

Lately, I have been more and more taken with tidy principles of data analysis. They are elegant and make analyses clearer and easier to comprehend. Following the tidyverse and ggraph, I have been quite intrigued by applying tidy principles to text anal...

In my last two posts (Part 1 and Part 2), I explored time series forecasting with the timekit package. In this post, I want to compare how Facebook’s prophet performs on the same dataset. Predicting future events/sales/etc. isn’t trivial for a ...

In my last post, I prepared and visually explored time series data. Now, I will use this data to test the timekit package for time series forecasting with machine learning. Forecasting In time series forecasting, we use models to predict future ti...

Data Science is a fairly broad term and encompasses a wide range of techniques from data visualization to statistics and machine learning models. But the techniques are only tools in a - sometimes very messy - toolbox. And while it is important to know...

This is to announce that Münster now has its very own R users group! If you are from the area, come join us (or if you happen to know someone who is and who might be interested, please forward the info). You can find us on meetup.com: https://...

In this post, I am exploring network analysis techniques in a family network of major characters from Game of Thrones. Not surprisingly, we learn that House Stark (specifically Ned and Sansa) and House Lannister (especially Tyrion) are the most import...

This is a reply to Wojciech Indyk’s comment on yesterday’s post on autoencoders and anomaly detection with machine learning in fraud analytics: “I think you can improve the detection of anomalies if you change the training set to the deep-autoen...

All my previous posts on machine learning have dealt with supervised learning. But we can also use machine learning for unsupervised learning. The latter are e.g. used for clustering and (non-linear) dimensionality reduction. For this task, I am using...

The classification decisions made by machine learning models are usually difficult - if not impossible - to understand by our human brains. The complexity of some of the most accurate classifiers, like neural networks, is what makes them perform so wel...

This week, I am exploring Holger K. von Jouanne-Diedrich’s OneR package for machine learning. I am running an example analysis on world happiness data and compare the results with other machine learning models (decision trees, random forest, gradient...

For Easter, I wanted to have a look at the number of hares in Germany. Wild hare populations have been rapidly declining over the last 10 years but during the last three years they have at least been stable. This plot shows the 16 federal states of Ge...