Category: R

Andrew Treadway shows how you can calculate Area Under the Curve in R:

AUC is an important metric in machine learning for classification. It is often used as a measure of a model’s performance. In effect, AUC is a measure between 0 and 1 of a model’s performance that rank-orders predictions from a model. For a detailed explanation of AUC, see this link.

Since AUC is widely used, being able to get a confidence interval around this metric is valuable to both better demonstrate a model’s performance, as well as to better compare two or more models. For example, if model A has an AUC higher than model B, but the 95% confidence interval around each AUC value overlaps, then the models may not be statistically different in performance. We can get a confidence interval around AUC using R’s pROC package, which uses bootstrapping to calculate the interval.

There are plenty of ways to calculate this useful metric, but this is definitely one of the easier methods. H/T R-bloggers

Evgeni Chasnovski takes us through what the parameters in the stats::density() R function do:

Argument bw is responsible for computing bandwith of kernel density estimation: one of the main parameters that greatly affect the output. It can be specified as either algorithm of computation or directly as number. Because actual bandwidth is computed as adjust*bw(adjust is another density() argument, which is explored in the next section), here we will see how different algorithms compute bandwidths, and the effect of changing numeric value of bandwidth will be shown in section about adjust.

There are 5 available algorithms: “nrd0”, “nrd”, “ucv”, “bcv”, “SJ”. 

Evgeni has also created animations for each of these, so it’s easy to see what they do compared to the default output.

Roland Stevenson shows us how to validate Type I and Type II errors when performing A/B tests in R:

In this post, we seek to develop an intuitive sense of what type I (false-positive) and type II (false-negative) errors represent when comparing metrics in A/B tests, in order to gain an appreciation for “peeking”, one of the major problems plaguing the analysis of A/B test today.

To better understand what “peeking” is, it helps to first understand how to properly run a test. We will focus on the case of testing whether there is a difference between the conversion rates cr_a and cr_b for groups A and B. We define conversion rate as the total number of conversions in a group divided by the total number of subjects. The basic idea is that we create two experiences, A and B, and give half of the randomly-selected subjects experience A and half B. Then, after some number of users have gone through our test, we measure how many conversions happened in each group. The important question is: how many users do we need to have in groups A and B in order to measure a difference in conversion rates of a particular size?

Read the whole thing. H/T R-Bloggers

Peter Ellis takes us through an attempt to perform near-term projection of Australian unemployment rates based on macroeconomic indicators:

“Leading” in this case will have to mean pretty fast, because the official unemployment stats in Australia come out from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) with admirable promptitude given the complexity of managing the Labour Force Survey. ABS Series 6202.0 – the monthly summary from the Labour Force Survey – comes out around two weeks after the reference month. Only a few economic variables of interest are available faster than that. In this blog post I look at two candidates for leading information that are readily available in more or less real time – interest rates and stock exchange prices.

One big change in the past decade in this sort of short-term forecasting of unemployment has been to model the transitions between participation, employed and unemployed people, rather than direct modelling of the resulting proportions. This innovation comes from an interesting 2012 paper by Barnichon and Nekarda. I’ve only skimmed this paper, but I’d like to look into how much of the gains they report comes from the focus on workforce transitions, and how much from their inclusion of new information in the form of vacancy postings and claims for unemployment insurance. My suspicion is that these latter two series have powerful new information. I will certainly be returning to vacancy information and job adverts at a later time – these are items which feature prominently for me in my day job at Nous Group in analysing the labour market.

This gets a little deep but it’s well worth the read. H/T R-bloggers