Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Data Science

R Versus Python

Vincent Granville believes that Python is overtaking R in the realm of data science:

We use the app in question to compare search interest for R data Science versus Python Data Science, see above chart.  It looks like until December 2016, R dominated, but fell below Python by early 2017. The above chart displays an interest index, 100 being maximum and 0 being minimum. Click here to access this interactive chart on Google, and check the results for countries other than US, or even for specific regions such as California or New York.

Note that Python always dominated R by a long shot, because it is a general-purpose language, while R is a specialized language. But here, we compare R and Python in the niche context of data science. The map below shows interest for Python (general purpose) per region, using the same Google index in question.

It’s an interesting look at the relative shift between R and Python as a primary language for statistical analysis.

Comments closed

Tokenizing Text With R

Rachael Tatman shows how to tokenize a set of text as the first step in a natural language processing experiment:

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to:

  • Read text into R
  • Select only certain lines
  • Tokenize text using the tidytext package
  • Calculate token frequency (how often each token shows up in the dataset)
  • Write reusable functions to do all of the above and make your work reproducible

For this tutorial we’ll be using a corpus of transcribed speech from bilingual children speaking in English.  You can find more information on this dataset and download it here.

It’s a nice tutorial, especially because the data set is a bit of a mess.

Comments closed

One-Way ANOVA Testing With R

Bidyut Ghosh shows how to perform a one-way ANOVA test in R:

From the above results, it is observed that the F-statistic value is 17.94 and it is highly significant as the corresponding p-value is much less than the level of significance (1% or 0.01). Thus, it is wise to reject the null hypothesis of equal mean value of mileage run across all the tyre brands. In other words, the average mileage of the four tyre brands are not equal.
Now you have to find out the pair of brands which differ. For this you may use the Tukey’s HSD test.

ANOVA is a fairly simple test, but it can be quite useful to know.

Comments closed

Simpson’s Paradox Explained

Mehdi Daoudi, et al, have a nice explanation of Simpson’s Paradox:

E.H. Simpson first described the phenomenon of Simpson’s paradox in 1951. The actual name “Simpson’s paradox” was introduced by Colin R. Blyth in 1972. Blyth mentioned that:

G.W. Haggstrom pointed out that Simpson’s paradox is the simplest form of the false correlation paradox in which the domain of x is divided into short intervals, on each of which y is a linear function of x with large negative slope, but these short line segments get progressively higher to the right, so that over the whole domain of x, the variable y is practically a linear function of x with large positive slope.

The authors also provide a helpful example with operational metrics, showing how aggregating the data leads to an opposite (and invalid) conclusion.

Comments closed

Gradient Boosting In R

Anish Sing Walia walks us through a gradient boosting exercise using R:

An important thing to remember in boosting is that the base learner which is being boosted should not be a complex and complicated learner which has high variance for e.g a neural network with lots of nodes and high weight values.For such learners boosting will have inverse effects.

So I will explain Boosting with respect to decision trees in this tutorial because they can be regarded as weak learners most of the times.We will generate a gradient boosting model.

Click through for more details.  H/T R-Bloggers

Comments closed

Evaluating A Data Science Project

Tom Fawcett gives us an interesting evaluation of a data science case study:

The model is a fully connected neural network with three hidden layers, with a ReLU as the activation function. They state that data from Google Compute Engine was used to train the model (implemented in TensorFlow), and Cloud Machine Learning Engine’s HyperTune feature was used to tune hyperparameters.

I have no reason to doubt their representation choices or network design, but one thing looks odd. Their output is two ReLU (rectifier) units, each emitting the network’s accuracy (technically: recall) on that class. I would’ve chosen a single Softmax unit representing the probability of Large Loss driver, from which I could get a ROC or Precision-Recall curve. I could then threshold the output to get any achievable performance on the curve. (I explain the advantages of scoring over hard classification in this post.)

But I’m not a neural network expert, and the purpose here isn’t to critique their network design, just their general approach. I assume they experimented and are reporting the best performance they found.

Read the whole thing.

Comments closed

Regression Trees And Double Seasonal Time Series Trends

Peter Laurinec walks us through an example of using regression trees to solve a problem with double-seasonal time series data in R:

Classification and regression tree (or decision tree) is broadly used machine learning method for modeling. They are favorite because of these factors:

  • simple to understand (white box)
  • from a tree we can extract interpretable results and make simple decisions
  • they are helpful for exploratory analysis as binary structure of tree is simple to visualize
  • very good prediction accuracy performance
  • very fast
  • they can be simply tuned by ensemble learning techniques

But! There is always some “but”, they poorly adapt when new unexpected situations (values) appears. In other words, they can not detect and adapt to change or concept drift well (absolutely not). This is due to the fact that tree creates during learning just simple rules based on training data. Simple decision tree does not compute any regression coefficients like linear regression, so trend modeling is not possible. You would ask now, so why we are talking about time series forecasting with regression tree together, right? I will explain how to deal with it in more detail further in this post.

This was a very interesting article.  Absolutely worth reading.  H/T R-Bloggers

Comments closed

K Nearest Cliques

Vincent Granville explains an algorithm built around finding cliques of data points:

The cliques considered here are defined by circles (in two dimensions) or spheres (in three dimensions.) In the most basic version, we have one clique for each cluster, and the clique is defined as the smallest circle containing a pre-specified proportion p of the points from the cluster in question. If the clusters are well separated, we can even use p = 1. We define the density of a clique as the number of points per unit area. In general, we want to build cliques with high density.

Ideally, we want each cluster in the training set to be covered by a small number of (possibly slightly overlapping) cliques, each one having a high density.  Also, as a general rule, a training set point can only belong to one clique, and (ideally) to only one cluster. But the circles associated with two cliques are allowed to overlap.

It’s an interesting approach, and I can see how it’d be faster than K Nearest Neighbors, but I do wonder how accurate the results would be in comparison to KNN.

Comments closed

Building An Image Recognizer With R

David Smith has a post showing how to build an image recognizer with R and Microsoft’s Cognitive Services Library:

The process of training an image recognition system requires LOTS of images — millions and millions of them. The process involves feeding those images into a deep neural network, and during that process the network generates “features” from the image. These features might be versions of the image including just the outlines, or maybe the image with only the green parts. You could further boil those features down into a single number, say the length of the outline or the percentage of the image that is green. With enough of these “features”, you could use them in a traditional machine learning model to classify the images, or perform other recognition tasks.

But if you don’t have millions of images, it’s still possible to generate these features from a model that has already been trained on millions of images. ResNet is a very deep neural network model trained for the task of image recognition which has been used to win major computer-vision competitions. With the rxFeaturize function in Microsoft R Client and Microsoft R Server, you can generate 4096 features from this model on any image you provide. The features themselves are meaningful only to a computer, but that vector of 4096 numbers between zero and one is (ideally) a distillation of the unique characteristics of that image as a human would recognize it. You can then use that features vector to create your own image-recognition system without the burden of training your own neural network on a large corpus of images.

Read the whole thing and follow David’s link to the Microsoft Cognitive blog for more details.

Comments closed

Understanding Decision Trees

Ramandeep Kaur explains how decision trees work:

Simply put, a decision tree is a tree in which each branch node represents a choice between a number of alternatives, and each leaf node represents a decision.

It is a type of supervised learning algorithm (having a pre-defined target variable) that is mostly used in classification problems and works for both categorical and continuous input and output variables. It is one of the most widely used and practical methods for Inductive Inference. (Inductive inference is the process of reaching a general conclusion from specific examples.)

Decision trees learn and train itself from given examples and predict for unseen examples.

Click through for an example of implementing the ID3 algorithm and generating a decision tree from a data set.

Comments closed