Publications by Paul van der Laken
Generative art: Let your computer design you a painting
I really like generative art, or so-called algorithmic art. Basically, it means you take a pattern or a complex system of rules, and apply it to create something new following those patterns/rules. When I finished my PhD, I got a beautiful poster of where the k-nearest neighbors algorithms was used to generate a set of connected points. Marcus V...
1820 sym 26 img
Predictive Power Score: Finding predictive patterns in your dataset
Last week, I shared this Medium blog on PPS — or Predictive Power Score — on my LinkedIn and got so many enthousiastic responses, that I had to share it with here too. Basically, the predictive power score is a normalized metric (values range from 0 to 1) that shows you to what extent you can use a variable X (say age) to predict a variable Y...
4233 sym Python (103 sym/3 pcs) 6 img
How to Write a Git Commit Message, in 7 Steps
Version control is an essential tool for any software developer. Hence, any respectable data scientist has to make sure his/her analysis programs and machine learning pipelines are reproducible and maintainable through version control. Often, we use git for version control. If you don’t know what git is yet, I advise you begin here. If you wor...
1642 sym Python (1024 sym/1 pcs)
Visualizing and interpreting Cohen’s d effect sizes
Cohen’s d (wiki) is a statistic used to indicate the standardised difference between two means. Resarchers often use it to compare the averages between groups, for instance to determine that there are higher outcomes values in a experimental group than in a control group. Researchers often use general guidelines to determine the size of an ef...
1767 sym 10 img
David Robinson’s R Programming Screencasts
David Robinson (aka drob) is one of the best known R programmers. Since a couple of years David has been sharing his knowledge through streaming screencasts of him programming. It’s basically part of R’s #tidytuesday movement. Alex Cookson decided to do us all a favor and annotate all these screencasts into a nice overview. https://docs.go...
1639 sym 4 img
Create a publication-ready correlation matrix, with significance levels, in R
In most (observational) research papers you read, you will probably run into a correlation matrix. Often it looks something like this: In Social Sciences, like Psychology, researchers like to denote the statistical significance levels of the correlation coefficients, often using asterisks (i.e., *). Then the table will look more like this: Rega...
3064 sym R (4480 sym/2 pcs) 22 img
How most statistical tests are linear models
Jonas Kristoffer Lindeløv wrote a great visual explanation of how the most common statistical tests (t-test, ANOVA, ANCOVA, etc) are all linear models in the back-end. Jonas’ original blog uses R programming to visually show how the tests work, what the linear models look like, and how different approaches result in the same statistics. Geor...
986 sym 4 img
10 Guidelines to Better Table Design
Jon Schwabisch recently proposed ten guidelines for better table design. Next to the academic paper, Jon shared his recommendations in a Twitter thread. I recently published “Ten Guidelines for Better Tables” in the Journal of Benefit Cost Analysis (@benefitcost) on ways to improve your data tables. Here's a thread summarizing the 10 guideli...
1534 sym 6 img
Bayesian Statistics using R, Python, and Stan
For a year now, this course on Bayesian statistics has been on my to-do list. So without further ado, I decided to share it with you already. Richard McElreath is an evolutionary ecologist who is famous in the stats community for his work on Bayesian statistics. At the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Richard teaches Bayesian ...
1145 sym 2 img
JavaScript for R — ebook
The R programming language has seen the integration of many languages; C, C++, Python, to name a few, can be seamlessly embedded into R so one can conveniently call code written in other languages from the R console. Little known to many, R works just as well with JavaScript—this book delves into the various ways both languages can work togethe...
1739 sym 2 img