Publications by Joseph Rickert
Party with the First Tribe
by Joseph Rickert In a recent previous post, I wrote about support vector machines, the representative master algorithm of the 5th tribe of machine learning practitioners described by Pedro Domingos in his book, The Master Algorithm. Here we look into algorithms favored by the first tribe, the symbolists, who see learning as the process of in...
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Instrumental Variables
by Joseph Rickert We all “know” that correlation does not imply causation, that unmeasured and unknown factors can confound a seemingly obvious inference. But, who has not been tempted by the seductive quality of strong correlations? Fortunately, it is also well known that a well done randomized experiment can account for the unknown confoun...
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Differential Privacy Mini-series from Win-Vector
by Nina ZumelPrincipal Consultant Win-Vector LLC We've just finished off a series of articles on some recent research results applying differential privacy to improve machine learning. Some of these results are pretty technical, so we thought it was worth working through concrete examples. And some of the original results are locked behind academ...
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Accessing Bitcoin Data with R
by Joseph Rickert I am not yet a Bitcoin advocate. Nevertheless, I am impressed with the amount of Bitcoin activity and the progress that advocates are making towards having Bitcoin recognized as a legitimate currency. Right now, I am mostly interested in the technology behind bitcoin and the possibility of working with some interesting data sets...
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fluent-r: a new R analytics integration library for JVM developers
by David Russell, fluent-r developer fluent-r is a new R analytics integration library for JVM application developers that improves upon existing solutions for integrating R analytics services delivered by popular open source R integration servers DeployR and OpenCPU. The fluent-r library provides a natural-language DSL alongside a simple API t...
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H2O World 2015
by Joseph Rickert The second, annual H2O World conference finished up yesterday. More than 700 people from all over the US attended the three-day event that was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California; a venue that pretty much sits well within the blast radius of ground zero for Data Science in the Silicon Valley. This wa...
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Rated R: Recommended Reading
by Joseph Rickert What are you reading? – and what are you recommending to friends, colleagues, and students who want to learn something about R programming? A quick search of Amazon will show that there are several new R books proposed for 2016; but of course, new doesn't necessarily mean better. I fully expect that many new books in all areas...
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Fun with Simpson’s Paradox: Simulating Confounders
Bob HortonSr Data Scientist, Microsoft Wikipedia describes Simpson’s paradox as “a trend that appears in different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined.” Here is the figure from the top of that article (you can click on the image in Wikipedia then follow the “more details” link to find the R code use...
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Mapping out Marriott’s Starwood Acquisition
by Michael Helbraun The software business includes travel, and that means hotels. The news that Marriott was acquiring Starwood was of particular interest to me – especially since more than 75% of my 95 nights so far this year on the road have been spent with one of those two companies. While other folks can evaluate if the deal makes sense f...
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R User Group Activity 2015
by Joseph Rickert 2015 has been a good year for R user groups, both in terms of activity and the number of new groups founded. The plot below which runs 12/30/2012 through the week beginning with Monday 11/23/2015 shows that the number of weekly meeting continues to drift up to the right. You can see the seasonal pattern of fewer meetings in the ...
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