Publications by Learning Machines
Learning Data Science: A/B Testing in Under One Minute
Google does it! Facebook does it! Amazon does it for sure! Especially in the areas of web design and online advertising, everybody is talking about A/B testing. If you quickly want to understand what it is and how you can do it with R, read on! The basic idea of A/B testing is to systematically (and normally automatically) test two different al...
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Thomas Ramge: Postdigital (Book Excerpt)
We are honoured to present to you an exclusive excerpt from digital thought leader and bestselling author Thomas Ramge’s new book Postdigital. Using AI to Fight Coronavirus, Foster Wealth and Fuel Democracy: In concrete terms, what would a postdigital world look like in which people — both individually and as a society — used digital techn...
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COVID-19: False Positive Alarm
In this post, we are going to replicate an analysis from the current issue of Scientific American about a common mathematical pitfall of Coronavirus antibody tests with R. Many people think that when they get a positive result of such a test they are immune to the virus with high probability. If you want to find out why nothing could be further f...
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Time Series Analysis: Forecasting Sales Data with Autoregressive (AR) Models
Forecasting the future has always been one of man’s biggest desires and many approaches have been tried over the centuries. In this post we will look at a simple statistical method for time series analysis, called AR for Autoregressive Model. We will use this method to predict future sales data and will rebuild it to get a deeper understanding ...
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Kalman Filter as a Form of Bayesian Updating
The Kalman filter is a very powerful algorithm to optimally include uncertain information from a dynamically changing system to come up with the best educated guess about the current state of the system. Applications include (car) navigation and stock forecasting. If you want to understand how a Kalman filter works and build a toy example in R, r...
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Doing Maths Symbolically: R as a Computer Algebra System (CAS)
When I first saw the Computer Algebra System Mathematica in the nineties I was instantly fascinated by it: you could not just calculate things with it but solve equations, simplify, differentiate and integrate expressions and even solve simple differential equations… not just numerically but symbolically! It helped me a lot during my studies at...
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Local Differential Privacy: Getting Honest Answers on Embarrassing Questions
Do you cheat on your partner? Do you take drugs? Are you gay? Are you an atheist? Did you have an abortion? Will you vote for the right-wing candidate? Not all people feel comfortable answering those kinds of questions in every situation honestly. So, is there a method to find the respective proportion of people without putting them on the spot? ...
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Network Analysis: Who is the Most Important Influencer?
Networks are everywhere: traffic infrastructure and the internet come to mind, but networks are also in nature: food chains, protein-interaction networks, genetic interaction networks and of course neural networks which are being modelled by Artificial Neural Networks. In this post, we will create a small network (also called graph mathematically...
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3.84 or: How to Detect BS (Fast)
In From Coin Tosses to p-Hacking: Make Statistics Significant Again! I explained the general principles behind statistical testing, here I will give you a simple method that you could use for quick calculations to check whether something fishy is going on (i.e. a fast statistical BS detector), so read on! We are living in a complex world and it ...
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Finding the Shortest Path with Dijkstra’s Algorithm
I have to make a confession: when it comes to my sense of orientation I am a total failure… sometimes it feels like GPS and Google maps were actually invented for me! Well, nowadays anybody uses those practical little helpers. But how do they actually manage to find the shortest path from A to B? If you want to understand the father of all rout...
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