Publications by Learning Machines

The Success Paradox: Why even a little Bit of Luck often beats Skill

05.05.2022

The skill-vs-luck debate never ceases to fascinate. Is it mainly skill, experience, hard work, and the “right” mindset that determines who is becoming successful, rich, or famous, or is it largely luck and fortunate circumstances? In this post, we will conduct an illuminating simulation to show that even a small amount of luck can make all th...

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One Rule (OneR) Machine Learning Classification in under One Minute

06.03.2017

You can also watch this video which goes through the following example step-by-step: Quick Start Guide for the OneR package (Video) After installing the OneR package from CRAN load it library(OneR) Use the famous Iris dataset and determine optimal bins for numeric data data <- optbin(iris) Build model with best predictor model <- OneR(dat...

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OneR – fascinating insights through simple rules

24.11.2018

We already saw the power of the OneR package in the preceding post. Here we want to give some more examples to gain some fascinating, often counter-intuitive, insights. Shirin Glander of Muenster University tested the OneR package with data from the World Happiness Report to find out what makes people happy: https://shiring.github.io/machine_lea...

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OneR – fascinating insights through simple rules

25.11.2018

We already saw the power of the OneR package in the preceding post. Here we want to give some more examples to gain some fascinating, often counter-intuitive, insights. Shirin Glander of Muenster University tested the OneR package with data from the World Happiness Report to find out what makes people happy: https://shiring.github.io/machine_lear...

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Why R for data science – and not Python?

02.12.2018

There are literally hundreds of programming languages out there, e.g. the whole alphabet of one letter programming languages is taken. In the area of data science there are two big contenders: R and Python. Now why is this blog about R and not Python? I have to make a confession: I really wanted to like Python. I dug deep into the language and so...

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Intuition for principal component analysis (PCA)

06.12.2018

Principal component analysis (PCA) is a dimension-reduction method that can be used to reduce a large set of (often correlated) variables into a smaller set of (uncorrelated) variables, called principal components, which still contain most of the information. PCA is a concept that is traditionally hard to grasp so instead of giving you the n’th...

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Learning R: A gentle introduction to higher-order functions

14.12.2018

Have you ever thought about why the definition of a function in R is different from many other programming languages? The part that causes the biggest difficulties (especially for beginners of R) is that you state the name of the function at the beginning and use the assignment operator – as if functions were like any other data type, like vect...

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Your AI journey… and Happy Holidays!

20.12.2018

I want to draw your attention to a very valuable (and short!) whitepaper from my colleague, Professor Andrew Ng, where he shares important insights on how to lead companies into the AI era. The five steps outlined in the paper are: Execute pilot projects to gain momentum Build an in-house AI team Provide broad AI training Develop an AI strategy ...

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Clustering the Bible

27.12.2018

During this time of year there is obviously a lot of talk about the Bible. As most people know the New Testament comprises four different Gospels written by anonymous authors 40 to 70 years after Jesus’ supposed crucifiction. Unfortunately we have lost all of the originals but only retained copies of copies of copies (and so on) which date back...

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Check Machin-like formulae with arbitrary-precision arithmetic

03.01.2019

Happy New Year to all of you! Let us start the year with something for your inner maths nerd Source: Wikimedia For those of you who don’t yet know Rosetta Code: it is a real cool site where you can find lots of interesting code examples in all kinds of different languages for many different tasks. Of course R is also present big time (at the t...

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