A couple of weeks ago, I started working with survival analysis. It was fairly new to me, so I had to dig into some new methods. There was one method that captured my attention: random survival forests (RSFs). It’s one of many statistical learning techniques designed to work with right-censored…
Since I intensively started using Visual Studio Code across my devices, with PowerShell as my main terminal, I started running into the following error quite a lot: <file> cannot be loaded because running scripts is disabled on this system. For more information, see about_Execution_Policies at https:/go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=135170. What’s happening here, is…
A while ago I started working in the JavaScript library D3.js to create some interactive visualizations. I even took a rather great Coursera course on the subject — Information Visualization: Programming with D3.js. If you’re not familiar with modern JavaScript syntax, D3.js has a rather steep learning curve. During this…
Ahh, user rights. The cause and solution to all of life’s identification problems. In this blog post I explain how you can access (private) google spreadsheets using the Python gspread library. Before you get started: make sure you have administrator rights to the spreadsheets you are trying to work with.…
In his book “A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics”, psychologist Daniel Levitin elaborates on some commonly made mistakes when it comes to interpreting data. Although a lot of the topics are closely related to the chapters from the best-selling 1960’s booklet “How to lies with Statistics” by Darrell Huff,…
Random Forest stays my number one go-to algorithm for quickly prototyping prediction algorithms. Last week, I worked on speeding up a feature engineering and training workflow for a marketing project. I moved from the traditional randomForest package to the — already three years old — package ranger. Here are my…
When you’re an R poweruser, pivoting tables in pandas feels unnecessarily complex. Why are there two pivot functions? Why does it return an index when you wanted a column? Why does it generate multi index columns? Those are the questions I tackle in this blog post. 💥 This blog post…
In this blog post, I will elaborate on a specific warning, the contexts in which it occurs and how you can solve or prevent it. It’s definitely in my top three of generic warnings that I bump into: NAs introduced by coercion Apparently, some NAs were added to my data…
I recently bought a Google Chromebook. It’s light, it’s fast, great battery, but it doesn’t support all the development tools that I’m used to when working on a Windows computer. There’s no Visual Studio Code (Python) and no RStudio (R). Me being a data scientist, that hurt in the beginning.…
Getting a firm understanding of NaNs in your dataset ensures you don’t draw wrong conclusions from an incomplete dataset. In this blog post I show how you can list the amount of NaNs per column, per row, and per group. First, let’s create some dummy data, and add some NaNs.…