Publications by Learning Machines
Contagiousness of COVID-19 Part I: Improvements of Mathematical Fitting (Guest Post)
Learning Machines proudly presents a guest post by Martijn Weterings from the Food and Natural Products research group of the Institute of Life Technologies at the University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland in Sion. The topic of this post will be the fitting with the R-package optim. Food? That sounds like a rather unlikely match for ...
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COVID-19 in the US: Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation of Actual Infections and Future Deaths
One of the biggest problems of the COVID-19 pandemic is that there are no reliable numbers of infections. This fact renders many model projections next to useless. If you want to get to know a simple method how to roughly estimate the real number of infections and expected deaths in the US, read on! As we have seen many times on this blog: simpl...
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Learning Data Science: Understanding ROC Curves
One widely used graphical plot to assess the quality of a machine learning classifier or the accuracy of a medical test is the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve, or ROC curve. If you want to gain an intuition and see how they can be easily created with base R read on! Many machine learning classifiers give you some kind of score or probabi...
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COVID-19: Analyze Mobility Trends with R
The global lockdown has slowed down mobility considerably. This can be seen in the data produced by our ubiquitous mobile phones. Apple is kind enough to make those anonymized and aggregated data available to the public. If you want to learn how to get a handle on those data and analyze trends with R read on! To download the current data set go ...
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ZeroR: The Simplest Possible Classifier… or: Why High Accuracy can be Misleading
In one of my most popular posts So, what is AI really? I showed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) basically boils down to autonomously learned rules, i.e. conditional statements or simply, conditionals. In this post, I create the simplest possible classifier, called ZeroR, to show that even this classifier can achieve surprisingly high values for...
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Learning R: Build xkcd’s Star Wars Spoiler Generator
Star Wars is somewhat nerdy, R definitely is… what could be more worthwhile than combining both This Sunday was Star Wars Day (May the 4th be with you!) and suitable for the occasion we will do a little fun project and implement the following xkcd flowchart, which can give us more than 2 million different Star Wars plots. Even if you are new t...
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Will AI become conscious any time soon?
We all know the classical Sci-Fi trope of intelligent machines becoming conscious and all the potential ramifications that could follow from there (free will, fighting their human creators, ethical dilemmas and so forth). Now, is this a realistic scenario? As a researcher in the area of AI (see e.g. So, what is AI really?), with a penchant for ph...
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Lying with Statistics: One Beer a Day will Kill you!
About two years ago the renowned medical journal “The Lancet” came out with the rather sensational conclusion that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption, so every little hurts! For example, drinking a bottle of beer per day (half a litre) would increase your risk of developing a serious health problem within one year by a whopping 7%!...
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Learning Statistics: Randomness is a Strange Beast
Our intuition concerning randomness is, strangely enough, quite limited. While we expect it to behave in certain ways (which it doesn’t) it shows some regularities that have unexpected consequences. In a series of seemingly random posts, I will highlight some of those regularities as well as consequences. If you want to learn something about ra...
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Learning R: Build a Password Generator
It is not easy to create secure passwords. The best way is to let a computer do it by randomly combining lower- and upper-case letters, digits and other printable characters. If you want to learn how to write a small function to achieve that read on! The exact task is again taken from Rosetta Code: Create a password generation program which wil...
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