What do People Do for Their Moms on Mothers Day?
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May 13, 2018
What do people do for their moms on Mother's Day? I sampled a small group of people and got a rough idea of different ways people show their love and appreciation.
Reinforcement Learning for the Game of Splendor
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May 04, 2018
Neural networks and reinforcement are used to teach a computer how to play the board game of Splendor. The process of training the network and its architecture are explained.
The Community of Garlicoin, the New Meme Cryptocurrency
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April 09, 2018
Garlicoin is the hottest new meme cryptocurrency. I surveyed about 200 of its enthusiasts to get a good idea of what the community looked like and what they thought about the cryptocurrency.
Visualizing the IHSA State Cross-Country Meet
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April 07, 2018
An analysis of how runners perform in the state IHSA cross-country meet and what the top runners look like in terms of pacing strategy. Also, some old-school footage from a while ago.
Exploring Data with Generative Clustering
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January 09, 2018
Clustering is a common machine learning technique applied to data for a variety of reasons, including dimensionality reduction, finding similar objects, and discovering important features. Here I demonstrate how generative clustering can be used with the Iris data set.
Visualizing My Runs in 2017
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January 01, 2018
A visualization of my running from 2017 using ggplot2.
Unpleasant Statistics: Santa Causes Kids to Turn Away From Christianity
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December 23, 2017
What are the holidays without abuse of statistical techniques? According to a recent survey, kids being told that they receive gifts from Santa are up to 150% more likely to turn away from Christianity as an adult.
Analyzing and Clustering Christmas Foods, Drinks, and Desserts
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December 22, 2017
When celebrating Christmas, most people think of a large feast as part of the celebration. In the fourth part of my Christmas article series, I look at what foods are common across different regions of the US. Clustering also shows interesting relationships between different foods and drinks.
Word Clouds of Christmas
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December 21, 2017
Visualizations of how people describe Christmas using word clouds.
When do Kids Stop Believing in Santa?
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December 20, 2017
When do kids stop believing in Santa? Are there any backgrounds more at risk for not believing in Santa as long? I explore these questions using a Christmas survey in part 2 of my series of Christmas articles.
Christmas Survey Results Part 1
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December 19, 2017
How do people celebrate Christmas? This is the first article in a series that looks at trends across different groups of people, where I look at more general aspects of the questions asked.
Overlaying Density Heatmaps on Geographic Maps in R
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December 15, 2017
In this example, I use noise complaint data from New York City to demonstrate how you can plot densities of events on a map, as well as how extreme the averages are.
How to use IPython Notebooks in Blog Posts
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November 08, 2017
You can convert IPython notebooks to html with the command-line to insert them into your blog/website, and use a stylesheet provided here for proper formatting and syntax highlighting.
Reinforcement Learning Demo with Keras
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November 05, 2017
Keras, a TensorFlow-based neural network library in Python, can be used to solve reinforcement learning tasks. In this demonstration, I demonstrate one method of solving a game to improve the odds of winning.
Suggestions for Making Your R Code Spookier
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October 25, 2017
The air is getting colder, and sometimes you just want to add some pizzazz to your R code. Here are some tips for making it spookier this frightful season.
When Leverage Overshadows Regularization
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October 18, 2017
Regularization is an effective way of preventing overfitting in a model. Highly influential points in a data set can create a large amount of variation in estimates despite its presence.
What Time Should You Post to Reddit? (Part 2)
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October 12, 2017
When is the ideal time to post to Reddit? Using a large sample of Reddit posts from Google BigQuery and elastic-net regression techniques, I take a closer look at post scoring patterns across Reddit.
A Tool for Censoring Geographic Data
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October 03, 2017
Want to share some personal GPS data but worried about privacy? Here is a Python script that can be used to censor data located near points you specify in both CSV and GPX files.
Tips for Effectively Using Color in Visualizations
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September 26, 2017
Color is an important aspect of any visualization. Often, readability is sacrificed for simplicity or aesthetics, even though it is not necessary. Here I demonstrate some examples of how to use and improve visualizations via choice of colors and color palettes.
Converting Garmin FIT Files to CSV
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September 22, 2017
Garmin GPS data can be converted to CSV files with important workout information, including location, heart rate, and elevation. I provide sources and a script for processing them using Python 3.