Publications by David Robinson
The monetizr package: make money on your open source R packages
I’ve had the great privilege to be a small part of the R open source community, contributing packages like broom, gganimate, fuzzyjoin, and ggfreehand. In the process I’ve become friends and colleagues with brilliant statisticians and data scientists and learned to engage with data in powerful ways. But there’s one thing that my colleagues ...
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The adblockr package: block ads from the monetizr package
I was horrified to learn of the existence of the monetizr package, which adds advertisements to R functions. The package goes against the entire philosophy of open source and the spirit of the R community. Luckily, I was able to construct a fix- the adblockr package. Use freely to get an ad-free experience For example, imagine someone locked the ...
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Understanding Bayesian A/B testing (using baseball statistics)
Previously in this series Understanding the beta distribution (using baseball statistics) Understanding empirical Bayes estimation (using baseball statistics) Understanding credible intervals (using baseball statistics) Understanding the Bayesian approach to false discovery rates (using baseball statistics) Who is a better batter: Mike Piazza o...
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Understanding beta binomial regression (using baseball statistics)
Previously in this series: Understanding the beta distribution Understanding empirical Bayes estimation Understanding credible intervals Understanding the Bayesian approach to false discovery rates Understanding Bayesian A/B testing In this series we’ve been using the empirical Bayes method to estimate batting averages of baseball players. Em...
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One year as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow
One day in January 2013 I found myself wasting time on the internet. This wasn’t a good idea: I was as busy as anyone 2.5 years into their PhD. I had to finish a presentation on some yeast genetics research, I was months behind on a paper with an NYU collaborator and even farther behind on some leftover undergraduate research. I was also busy i...
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Releasing the StackLite dataset of Stack Overflow questions and tags
At Stack Overflow we’ve always been committed to sharing data: all content contributed to the site is CC-BY-SA licensed, and we release regular “data dumps” of our entire history of questions and answers. I’m excited to announce a new resource specially aimed at data scientists, analysts and other researchers, which we’re calling the St...
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stacksurveyr: An R package with the 2016 Developer Survey Results
This year, more than fifty thousand programmers answered the Stack Overflow 2016 Developer Survey, in the largest survey of professional developers in history. Last week Stack Overflow released the full (anonymized) results of the survey at stackoverflow.com/research. To make analysis in R even easier, today I’m also releasing the stacksurveyr ...
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Does sentiment analysis work? A tidy analysis of Yelp reviews
This year Julia Silge and I released the tidytext package for text mining using tidy tools such as dplyr, tidyr, ggplot2 and broom. One of the canonical examples of tidy text mining this package makes possible is sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is often used by companies to quantify general social media opinion (for example, using tweets a...
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Text analysis of Trump’s tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half
I don’t normally post about politics (I’m not particularly savvy about polling, which is where data science has had the largest impact on politics). But this weekend I saw a hypothesis about Donald Trump’s twitter account that simply begged to be investigated with data: Every non-hyperbolic tweet is from iPhone (his staff). Every hyperbolic...
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useR and JSM 2016 conferences: a story in tweets
I was amused by a Guardian article last month that declared “I’m a serious academic, not a professional Instagrammer,” arguing that social media is a distraction for scientific research. This attitude was, to say the least, not popular on academic Twitter, which responded with the #seriousacademic hashtag. When someone tries to claim that ...
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