Publications by Ryan
My Crappy Fantasy Football Draft
I compared the results of my fantasy football draft with the results of more than 1500 mock drafts at the Fantasy Football Calculator (FFC). I looked at where player X was drafted in our league, subtracted off the average draft position on FFC, and divided by the standard deviation of the draft positon of that player on FFC. In other words, I...
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Lists of English Words
When I was a kid, I went through an 80s music phase…well, some things never change. “People just love to play with words…” Know that song? Anyway… One of the biggest pains of text mining and NLP is colloquialism — language that is only appropriate in casual language and not in formal speech or writing. Words such as informal contracti...
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Introduction to statistical finance with R
During the first part of our meeting, Nicolas Christou gave an introduction of statistical finance in R, and presented a package he co-authored with previous PhD student David Diez (2010). Video of the talk is below:During the second part, we accommodated shorter talks outlining R users’ experiences with statistical finance in R.Kyle Matoba, a ...
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Transactions, and Pondering their Use in Casinos
A couple of weeks ago, Bradford Cross of FlightCaster posted in Measuring Measures that transactions are the next big data category. I argue that they already are, and from reading his blog post, he seems to suggest this as well but I will admit that I think I missed his point. There are some clear examples of transactions and their importance: ...
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Accessing R from Python using RPy2
This past Tuesday I had the opportunity to present a short talk (a bit long) related to text mining at the Los Angeles R Users’ Group. Since I do most of my text mining in Python, I took this opportunity to discuss RPy2, an interface to R from Python. My slides are below: Accessing R from Python using RPy2 View more presentations from Ryan ...
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NBA Analysis: Coming Soon!
I decided to spend a few hours this weekend writing the R code to scrape the individual statistics of NBA players (2010-11 only). I originally planned to write up a few NBA-related analyses, but a friend was visiting from out of town and, of course, that means less time sitting in front of my computer…which is a good thing! So in between an...
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NBA, Logistic Regression, and Mean Substitution
[Note: I wrote this on a flight and didn’t proofread it at all. You’ve been warned of possibly incoherencies!] I’m currently sitting at about 32K feet above sea level on my way from Tampa International to DIA and my options are (1) watch a shitty romantic comedy starring Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, et al. or (2) finish my blog post abou...
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R and the Data Science Toolkit
I recently decided to present a talk to the Denver R Users Group (DRUG) on how to make an R package (May 17). There were only two problems: (1) I’ve never made a package and (2) I had nothing in mind to package up. At about this same time, Pete Warden and others were blogging about the iPhone tracking issue [1]. How are these two events rel...
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The RDSTK Presentation at Denver R Users Group
Last night I presented a talk at the DRUG introducing the R wrapper for the Data Science Toolkit. Lots of good questions, good forking, and good beer afterwards at Freshcraft. The slides are given below. Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: The Log Cabin » R. R-bloggers.com offers d...
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Google Trends, R, and the NFL
A week or so ago I saw a tweet related how the NFL lockout was affecting the search traffic for “fantasy football” on Google (using Google Trends). Basically, the search traffic (properly normalized on Google Trends) was down prior to the end of the lockout. I decided to explore a bit with this myself and chose to look into the RGoogleTre...
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