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Day: February 6, 2024

New Features in data.table

John MacKintosh takes us through what’s new in R’s data.table package:

The newest version of data.table has hit CRAN, and there are lots of great new features.

Among them, a %notin% function, a new let function that can be used instead of := ( I wasn’t too fussed about this originally but have tried it a few times today and I may well adopt it – although I do like that := really stands out in my code when assigning / updating variables).

Read on for the big changes. H/T R-Bloggers.

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Exploring the Area under the ROC Curve

Aayush Srivastava takes us through one of the classics of classification:

In the realm of machine learning classification, model evaluation is an essential step to assess the performance and effectiveness of various algorithms. One widely-used tool for this purpose is the Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve (AUC-ROC curve). In this blog, we will delve into the significance of the AUC-ROC curve, how it is calculated, and why it is an invaluable metric for evaluating classification models.

In this article, we will discuss the performance metrics used in the classification and also explore the implications of using two, namely AUC and ROC. Here is an overview of the important points that we will discuss in the article. 

The fun anecdote around ROC curves is that their name actually makes sense if you know the origin: it came out of the British army in World War II, where they tracked how their radar operators classified blips as German aircraft or noise (e.g., flocks of birds). The radar receiver operators had certain characteristics, where some were more effective at separating actual threats from noise, hence the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve.

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Monitoring if an Azure Server Goes Offline

Paul Bergson builds an alert:

My miniature schnauzer, Raven, is a smart and lively dog who loves to hunt for rodents in the yard. She has a keen sense of smell and can detect the slightest movement of her prey. She barks loudly to alert me whenever she finds a potential target and chases after it with all her speed. However, the rodents are too cunning and often escape to a tree or a hole in the ground before she can catch them. She then returns to me with a disappointed look on her face, hoping for a treat or a pat on the head.

Azure Monitor is like Raven, but much more efficient and reliable. It can monitor your Azure servers and detect when they go offline in ~1 minute. It can also alert you via email, SMS, or webhook when something goes wrong, so you can take action to fix it. With Azure Monitor, you can stay on top of your server’s health and performance.

Read on to see how you can use Azure Monitor and build policies, with much less cleanup requirement than a dog.

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