February 2020: "Top 40" New R Packages

Joseph Rickert 2020-03-26

One hundred sixty-four new packages made it to CRAN in February. Here are my “Top 40” picks in eleven categories: Computational Methods, Data, Genomics, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Medicine, Science, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, and Visualizations. Computational Methods delayed v0.3.0: Implements mechanisms to parallelize dependent tasks in a manner that optimizes the computational resources. Functions produce “delayed computations” which may be parallelized using futures. See the vignette for details. tergmLite v2.

Comparing Machine Learning Algorithms for Predicting Clothing Classes: Part 4

Florianne Verkroost 2020-03-24

Florianne Verkroost is a Ph.D. candidate at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. She has a passion for data science and a background in mathematics and econometrics. She applies her interdisciplinary knowledge to computationally address societal problems of inequality. This is the fourth and final post in a series devoted to comparing different machine learning methods for predicting clothing categories from images using the Fashion MNIST data by Zalando.

Simulating COVID-19 interventions with R

Tim Churches 2020-03-19

Tim Churches is a Senior Research Fellow at the UNSW Medicine South Western Sydney Clinical School at Liverpool Hospital, and a health data scientist at the Ingham Institute for Applied Medical Research. This post examines simulation of COVID-19 spread using R, and how such simulations can be used to understand the effects of various public health interventions design to limit or slow its spread. DISCLAIMER The simulation results in this blog post, or any other results produced by the R code described in it, should not be used as actual estimates of mortality or any other aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Outlier Days with R and Python

Jonathan Regenstein 2020-03-16

Welcome to another installment of Reproducible Finance. Today’s post will be topical as we look at the historical behavior of the stock market after days of extreme returns and it will also explore one of my favorite coding themes of 2020 - the power of RMarkdown as an R/Python collaboration tool. This post originated when Rishi Singh, the founder of tiingo and one of the nicest people I have encountered in this crazy world, sent over a note about recent market volatility along with some Python code for analyzing that volatility.

Comparing Machine Learning Algorithms for Predicting Clothing Classes: Part 3

Florianne Verkroost 2020-03-10

Florianne Verkroost is a Ph.D. candidate at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. She has a passion for data science and a background in mathematics and econometrics. She applies her interdisciplinary knowledge to computationally address societal problems of inequality. This is the third post in a series devoted to comparing different machine learning methods for predicting clothing categories from images using the Fashion MNIST data by Zalando. In the first post of this series, we prepared the data for analysis and used my “go-to” Python deep learning neural network model to predict the clothing categories of the Fashion MNIST data.

COVID-19 epidemiology with R

Tim Churches 2020-03-05

Tim Churches is a Senior Research Fellow at the UNSW Medicine South Western Sydney Clinical School at Liverpool Hospital, and a health data scientist at the Ingham Institute for Applied Medical Research, also located at Liverpool, Sydney. His background is in general medicine, general practice medicine, occupational health, public health practice, particularly population health surveillance, and clinical epidemiology. Introduction As I write this on 4th March, 2020, the world is on the cusp of a global COVID-19 pandemic caused by the SARS-Cov2 virus.

Comparing Machine Learning Algorithms for Predicting Clothing Classes: Part 2

Florianne Verkroost 2020-03-03

Florianne Verkroost is a Ph.D. candidate at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford. She has a passion for data science and a background in mathematics and econometrics. She applies her interdisciplinary knowledge to computationally address societal problems of inequality. This is the second post in a series devoted to comparing different machine and deep learning methods to predict clothing categories from images using the Fashion MNIST data by Zalando.

January 2020: "Top 40" New R Packages

Joseph Rickert 2020-02-24

One hundred forty-seven new packages made it to CRAN in January. Here are my “Top 40” picks in nine categories: Computational Methods, Genomics, Machine Learning, Mathematics, Medicine, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities and Visualization. Computational Methods FSSF v0.1.1: Provides three methods proposed by Shang & Apley (2019) to generate fully-sequential space-filling designs inside a unit hypercube. seagull v1.0.5: Implements a proximal gradient descent solver for the operators lasso, group lasso, and sparse-group lasso.

R, Public Health and Politics

Joseph Rickert 2020-02-19

Last week, Lancet published the paper Improving the prognosis of health care in the USA by Alison P Galvani, Alyssa S Parpia, Eric M Foster, Burton H Singer, Meagan C Fitzpatrick of CIDMA, the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis, Yale School of Public Health. The paper, which, provides a detailed analysis of the single-payer system introduced by Senator Sanders in the Medicare for All Act was published with a Shiny application that allows readers to test key assumptions regarding health care budgets, projected revenue, and the projected expansion of health care use.

rstudio::conf 2020 Videos

Joseph Rickert 2020-02-18

rstudio::conf 2020 is already receding in the rear view mirror, but the wealth of resources generated by the conference will be valuable for quite some time. All of the materials from the workshops, and now all one hundred and four videos of conference talks are available. This unique video collection offers valuable insight into how developers, data scientists, statisticians, journalists, physicians, educators and other R savvy professionals are using their domain knowledge, analytical expertise and coding skills to make the world a better place.