Author Archives: Nick

On the Seasonality of Hoppy Beers

Hops are what give beer a bitter, tangy, citrusy, earthy, fruity, floral, herbal, woody, piney, and/or a spicy aromas and flavors. Originally they were used as a preservative because of their natural antimicrobial powers, now they are a defining characteristic … Continue reading

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A Small Trick for Big Data in R

The other day I was writing a prediction script in R for a very large data set. I was data prepping and needed to create a logical vector from a numeric vector. I didn't want to spend the time loading … Continue reading

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Webscraping in R: Part 1

It's hard to believe, but webscraping in R can be done really easily. With no fancy packages either. I recently ran into the need to scrape weather information from the web. After writing the program, I realized this specific task … Continue reading

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Using DPLYR in R: A Quicker, Easier Way to Work with Data

As I promised, I thought I would show an example using DPLYR. I decided to create my own data set, instead of going with a canned data set in R. I did this to preface my next few posts. After … Continue reading

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Fast Data Frame Modification in R

One of the frequent data structures I use in R is a data frame. Data frames are similar to matrices except they allow different types of variables in each column. I always rejoice when I can reduce the analysis at … Continue reading

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Short Circuiting Logical Statements in R

Short circuiting logical statements are the way ‘lazy’ programming languages evaluate logical statements.  To identify whether or not the programming language you are using is lazy or eager, reference the chart on the wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-circuit_evaluation The lazy (and quicker) … Continue reading

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Big Data Introduction

Happy Holidays! For the next few posts, I will be talking about using some tools/tricks on big data. I think that the term 'big data' gets thrown around a bit much these days. The more common definition of big data … Continue reading

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The Simplicity of Python (an example)

Previously, I posted on how to forward fill missing data in columns of data in R and Excel. I just figured out how to do this in Python, and was blown away. Ready? data = Series(['A','B','C','D','E','F'], index = [0,2,5,7,12,14]) data.reindex(range(14),method='ffill') … Continue reading

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Intro to Survey Analysis

Lately, more people have approached me with questions on how to analyze survey data. There are very interesting problems associated with survey analysis. In dealing with surveys, I have seen mistakes made in creating them. Here are some general rules … Continue reading

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The Continuous Breeder's Equation

The Breeder's Equation has always fascinated me. I worked a bit with this equation in graduate school, and now that I'm free to work with whatever interests me at the moment, so I thought I would bring this back up. … Continue reading

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