Publications by S. Richter-Walsh
Our Acid Earth
The Earth’s oceans, soils, and freshwater bodies are acidifying. Acid rain was in the media a lot in the 80’s and 90’s but has been forgotten as of late. This ignored menace is having many negative effects on the environment. Fossil fuel combustion, transportation emissions, deforestation, and the mining of coal and metal ores are just some...
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Reflections
We know much as a species yet we have so much more to learn. Each of us alive today could just as easily have been born into consciousness centuries or millenia ago, and have had little idea that the Earth revolved around the Sun nor that our solar system was just one of billions in the observable Universe. Had the evolutionary lottery of our in...
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The other carbon dioxide problem.
Researchers say ocean acidification may have dramatic effects on phytoplankton. Edit section Phytoplankton, tiny plants which live in the ocean, form the foundation of the marine food web and play an important role in the regulation of Earth’s climate. These wonderful organisms create their own food using sunlight, nutrients and carbon dioxid...
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Predicting the Zakopane 2017 men’s ski jumping competition
When I was a young boy with a wild imagination, I used to try my hand at numerous sports ranging from tennis to gaelic footbal to soccer, each with varying degrees of success. Living in the countryside throughout my childhood, a big garden allowed me to construct vivid simulations of soccer championships (crowd and all) in my head as I kicked a f...
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An Analysis of Global Shark Attacks between 1543-2016
Travelling to a warm country and plan on hitting the beach? “Beware of the sharks!!” While the expression has almost become a cliché at this stage, shark attacks do occur and the fact that the global ocean is heating up potentially facilitates the occurrence of attacks (I would refer to them as interactions but we will leave it as attack for...
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IMDB Movie Analysis
Movies of late haven’t impressed (this viewer anyhow) and I keep finding myself returning to classics of the 1980’s and 1990’s to get my movie fix. While browsing through Kaggle datasets, I came across the IMDB 5000 Movie Dataset which contains data on over 5000 movies scraped from the IMDB website. I dove into the data to see what I could ...
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Predicting the Willingen 2017 men’s ski jumping competition
In an earlier post of mine, I carried out an analysis on ski jumping data for Zakopane, Poland and attempted to predict which athletes would end up on the podium. I also created a classification tree and tested it on the 2017 competition data with good results. For this side project of mine, I hope to predict podium finishes for three major compe...
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Implementing the Gradient Descent Algorithm in R
A Brief Introduction Linear regression is a classic supervised statistical technique for predictive modelling which is based on the linear hypothesis: y = mx + c where y is the response or outcome variable, m is the gradient of the linear trend-line, x is the predictor variable and c is the intercept. The intercept is the point on the y-axis wher...
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Naive Bayes Classification in R (Part 1)
Introduction A very useful machine learning method which, for its simplicity, is incredibly successful in many real world applications is the Naive Bayes classifier. I am currently taking a machine learning module as part of my data science college course and this week’s practical work involved a classification problem using the Naive Bayes met...
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Naive Bayes Classification in R (Part 2)
Following on from Part 1 of this two-part post, I would now like to explain how the Naive Bayes classifier works before applying it to a classification problem involving breast cancer data. The dataset is sourced from Matjaz Zwitter and Milan Soklic from the Institute of Oncology, University Medical Center in Ljubljana, Slovenia (formerly Yugosl...
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