Publications by Frank Portman

Introducing FlyVis

15.12.2013

After a couple all-nighters we’re finally done with our undergraduate statistics thesis. The abstract provides a brief overview of what we were trying to accomplish: We explore the possibility of improving data analysis through the use of interactive visualization. Exploration of data and models is an iterative process. We hypothesize that dy...

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On Lagrange Polynomials

30.09.2015

Let’s take $n$ distinct points on the real line: Yay. We can now define the Lagrange Polynomials : Why am I making you look at this beauté? Turns out there’s some neat mathematical properties – namely in the subject of polynomial interpolation. That’s a fancy way of saying ‘fit a polynomial through certain points’ but we’ll get to...

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A Graphical Extension of Twitter’s AnomalyDetection Package

02.01.2016

My New Year’s resolution is to make more than one blog post in 2016. I’m halfway to my minimum goal as of January 2nd so things are looking good. Background Twitter released a new R package earlier this year named AnomalyDetection (link to Github). The Github goes into a bit more detail, but at a high-level it uses a Seasonal Hybrid ESD (S-H-...

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bayesAB: A New R Package for Bayesian AB Testing

14.09.2016

This is a teaser blog post to showcase my new R package, bayesAB. Below is the intro of the knitted HTML of the introduction.Rmd vignette of the package. Formatting/colors may be a bit off since the vignette has it’s own styling. Check the full vignette here. Check it out on Github here. Newer version has since been released. Most A/B test app...

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bayesAB 0.7.0 + A Primer on Priors

11.10.2016

bayesAB 0.7.0 Quick announcement that my package for Bayesian AB Testing, bayesAB, has been updated to 0.7.0 on CRAN. Some improvements on the backend as well a few tweaks for a more fluid UX/API. Some links: bayesAB Github Repo CRAN Page Now, on to the good stuff. Why should we care about priors? Most questions I’ve gotten since I released b...

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On the German Tank / Taxicab Problem

30.11.2016

I always get giddy when I can apply real statistics and math to problems in my life. Recently, I had an opportunity to apply the ‘Taxicab Problem’ to something that came up at work. Given that I work for a ridesharing platform and I was quite literally counting “taxis” (or at least cars meant to drive others around), this was doubly exqui...

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