Publications by ntguardian
How the House Makes a Profit: A R Shiny App for Explaining the Key Idea to Gambling
As many of you may know, I teach statistics at the University of Utah. Below is a post about how industries based on chance events, such as casinos or insurance companies, are able to guarantee a profit. I have also included R code for a Shiny app that demonstrates the ideas discussed in the blog post. Several industries’ core business model i...
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SSA Baby Names Visualization with R and Shiny
CapitalOne contacted me a few months ago and requested that I apply for an internship with them for a data science related position. I never got the job (nor did I really want it; I had already agreed to teach during the summer and I was apprehensive about leaving people hanging, and also about moving), but I did go through part of the interview ...
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Did Wages Detach from Productivity in 1973? An Investigation
This is the third and final blog post in my series on income inequality (read the other two here and here). This post discusses the detachment of compensation from productivity that occurred around 1973. I look at the data and use R for exploring this break, along with why it may have occurred. R code is with the analysis, in the spirit of r...
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Is Hillary Clinton a Progressive? An Investigation Using Statistical Methods
There was once a time where only the most extreme leftists would accuse Hillary Clinton of not being a true progressive, prior to, say, 2008. Even after 2008, Hillary Clinton was seen as perhaps being a more moderate Democrat, but still, ultimately, a progressive. Republicans certainly would call Clinton a leftist and still continue to believe so...
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Deceit in Politics; An Analysis of PolitiFact Data
Naturally, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have been accused of lying; if I had told you in 2012 that both candidates from both political parties were being accused of lies, you would likely have given me a blank, disinterested stare; this alone is not shocking. What is shocking, though, is the level of deceit and how central a theme it was...
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Using Microsoft’s Emotion API to Settle an Old Argument
So Tuesday happened. I have a lot to say about our President-elect, and you’ll probably see a couple posts about him in the next few weeks. But that’s for later. Today, I’m writing about a more pressing issue, one that has been subject to debate for years without resolution, and I plan to settle this debate once and for all. Do I look angry...
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Where to Go from Here? Tips for Building Up R Experience
At the University of Utah, I teach the R lab that accompanies MATH 3070, “Applied Statistics I.”” None of my students are presumed to have any programming experience, and they never hesitate to remind me of that fact, especially when they are starting out. When I create assignments and pick problems, I often can write a one- or three-line s...
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A Political Cartoon and a Markov Chain
Pat Bagley is easily my favorite political cartoonist, period. For the politically aware in Utah, he is almost legendary, enjoying superstar status. I’ve been aware of him since I was a kid, and I always loved his cartoons. Not only does his artistic style appeal to me, he has a way of illustrating a situation in politics that explains it more ...
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On Programming Languages; Why My Dad Went From Programming to Driving a Bus
In Data Science from Scratch, a book introducing data science using Python, Joel Grus said the following about R (pg. 302): Although you can totally get away with not learning R, a lot of data scientists and data science projects use it, so it’s worth getting familiar with it. In part, this is so that you can understand people’s R-based ...
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An Introduction to Stock Market Data Analysis with R (Part 1)
Around September of 2016 I wrote two articles on using Python for accessing, visualizing, and evaluating trading strategies (see part 1 and part 2). These have been my most popular posts, up until I published my article on learning programming languages (featuring my dad’s story as a programmer), and has been translated into both Russian (which...
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