Introduction LAST WEEK I SHOWED YOU 10 TASTY WAYS TO VISUALIZE MORTGAGE RATES, but I’ve got another delicious one for you. Y’all like ribbon candy? As before we’ll create this chart with R. The data The data I’m going to use are estimates of weekly U.S. average 30-year fixed mortgage rates from the Primary Mortgage Market Survey…

Introduction THE GREAT THING ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA is that it helps put me in contact with people from around the world. I started up a conversation with Twitter user @benmyers29 who shared some recent trends in Canadian housing markets. 89% of Canadians have more than 25% equity in their homes. Avg equity ratio is 74%…

Introduction IN ORDER TO HELP PEOPLE UNDERSTAND WHAT’S GOING ON with the economy, housing and mortgage markets I spend a great deal of time thinking about interest rates. Interest rates, specifically mortgage rates are very important to housing and mortgage markets…

How do I restrict access to my service, by IP address range in…

Today I want to tell you about an approach for functional programming in R – and then apply it to studying population growth! I have been studying some of the purrr functions lately…

Introduction I HAVE BEEN WATCHING SOME VIDEOS of Plotcon 2016…

Introduction ON FRIDAY I MADE SOME ACCIDENTAL data art. I ended up with something pretty much useless, but kind of pretty. I shared it on Twitter: made an unintentional sorta streamgraph #graphfail pic.twitter…

Yesterday I asked my beloved Twitter nerds to recommend to me their favourite quantitative texts in Ecology: my postdoc super tells me I can BUY BOOKS! 💓📚📚💓 quick sweet friends, what are your fun statistical ecology book recommendations? - Andrew MacDonald (@polesasunder) December 2, 2016 As a way of saying “Thank you!” I thought that I would put all the books in a list for anyone who is…

HERE IS A GIF COMPARING house prices, rents, other prices and incomes: And a static version with code. In order for it to work, you’re going to need a data file with columns corresponding to the date and the data as described in the footnote (available from FHFA, BLS, and BEA). The data should be laid out like so, and I’ve saved them in a …

CRAN packagesI mentioned in an earlier post that I like to keep track of new and updated packages On average, a new package is provided to CRAN every 5 hours and updates are even more numerous CRAN provides an availablity table and there is also the informative CRANberries site plus twitter announcements but it is still hard to keep track of all the new…

Have you ever wondered just what would break if that system (you know the one) went down? Do you actually know what systems depend on it? How do the reports get from it to Marketing? In this post, I’ll describe a simple technique I’ve developed to surface and share all this juicy, interesting information…

EARL Boston, November 2016 I was really pleased to be asked to speak at EARL Boston again this year. On this occasion I was asked to talk about using R in production and whether it’s really possible/advisable or not…

As more enterprise scale businesses migrate their workloads to AWS, the size and complexity of the solutions they are trying to manage is growing…

Bookdownbookdown is an R package using RMarkdown making it relatively easy to createa book available in multiple…

How can I add constraints on what hosts can run given…

Growth in consumer prices RECENT DATA INDICATE THAT CONSUMER PRICES INFLATION is ticking up, though the overall pace of inflation remains below historical averages. In this post I’m going to create a few plots analyzing trends in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) published by the U.S…

Just a quick reminder that the second rstudio conference to be held in Florida in January is almost sold out (32 tickets available at time of writing) Needless to say, a great chance to network as well as take in some interesting talks Probably will not be going myself…

UK 2015 ElectionI like to check out new and enhanced R packages, particularly those relating to socio-economic issues and sports A recent new entry is hansard, which pulls data from the UK Parliament API Other required packages, which I will make extensive use of in future code extracts, are tidyverse, for data preparation and processing, and plotly, for a wide set of interactive…

Google Developer Experts are a very interesting group of highly skilled people with a passion for technology and spreading their knowledge. We will talk about how they are using the cloud to improve research on cancer. She is also an advisory board member at Codenvy, and AlgebraixData…

It’s been a while… … since I had a blog up and running However, RStudio’s Yihui Xie continues to extend R Markdown into new areas and his latest package, blogdown, integrates well with Hugo, a static website engine to display code…

To install the package: The first example uses a flat map. Therefore it is important to break lines at the international dateline when preparing the data. In the second example, lines cross the dateline are not split because the segments will be plotted on the globe…

Last week I had the opportunity to attend a “Cisco Meraki Masters” session at Meraki HQ in San Francisco. Meraki Masters is a program that sits on top of CMNA to give partners a deeper view of the Meraki product line, vision and roadmap. Merakify a.k.a. “Don’t spend your time doing work a well-trained monkey could do…

Get ready for some real hacking, involving gRPC, Kubernetes, many programming languages, and even a bit of soldering! Sandeep loves video games, making music, and martial arts, and has Bachelors in Marketing and Computer…

So, I thought that it might be good if I instead share the article here on my blog and r bloggers, so that people can comment below and share their thoughts. Here we go. Writing functions in R is an important skill for anyone using R. S3 methods allow for functions to be generalised across different classes and are easy to…

Introduction HOUSE PRICES HAVE NOW RECOVERED BACK TO THEIR PRE-RECESSION PEAK, at least according to some indices…

Matt is a founding member of the Helm…

In R, this code looked like this (in two dimensions): Iteratively, we put one point from our candidate subset (S) back into the original se (M) and check all distances between the points in S to those in M to find the point with the highest minimum distance…

Here’s a gif I made of the awesome R API framework, Plumber, in action via pm2. On the left, are the individual endpoints showing CPU and memory usage. In this example we have 5 replica endpoints and a load balancer, the last of the items on the left, round-robining between them. The load balanacer in this case is also under the control of pm2…

At Google, Chris is the Lead PM for Cloud Developer Tools, which includes driving our tooling and libraries efforts around Windows and…

We are happy to announce that we can finally answer the question on how to cite mlr properly in publications. Our paper on mlr has been published in the open-access Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) and can be downloaded on the journal home page…

IN THIS POST I WANT TO LOOK AT THE HISTORY OF HOMEOWNERSHIP in the United States. I’m going to go relatively far back in time, using Census data to compare the evolution of the homeownership rate by state from 1900 through 2015. Along the way we’ll make several different visualizations. Data For data we’re going to rely on the U.S…

Ines is a product manager in Cloud Networking. She has dedicated her career to in product, and development roles for carrier and enterprise networking infrastructure and applications, from access, edge and backbone cores…

We inspect our results by printing the eulerr object or directly access and plot the residuals. No we get to the fun part: plotting our diagram…

Introduction The Python Community has a devroom during the FOSDEM in Brussels in Belgium. The event will take place during the first week-end of February 2017…

I have translated Paul Bays’ Matlab functions for modeling continuous response data into R . Bays’ guide to the Matlab functions and their usage can be found here. I have a detailed guide to the R functions and their usage over on Github…

There is not, however, an analogue for qualitative color palettes that will get you beyond the limits of 8–12 colors of colorbrewer’s qualitative color palettes. The function then proceeds by projecting these colors into the sRGB space…

A couple of views of mortgage rates: Mortgage Rates in 2016 This chart shows the weekly average for the 30-year fixed rate morrtgage. Comparing mortgage rates by week This viz compares weekly mortgage rates (30-year fixed rate mortgage) by year. Each line represents a different year. The x-axis display the week of the year (from 1 to 52). Homeownership gif A homeownership rate viz…

In his spare time, he likes going to the movies and watching video games (He doesn’t play them as often as they’ve become too complicated - so mostly watches on Youtube Gaming or…

IN THIS POST I WANT TO CREATE some data visualizations with R using the recently released Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data. For this post I’m going to return to the 2015 HMDA that you can get from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) webpage and I discussed earlier. Check out my prior post for more discussion of how we build these data visualizations…

Introducing text2vec 0.4 Today I’m pleased to announce new major release of text2vec - text2vec 0.4 which is already on CRAN…

John Wilkes has been at Google since 2008, where he is working on cluster management and infrastructure services. Before that, he spent a long time at HP Labs, becoming an HP and ACM Fellow in 2002…

I have posted a new R data animation video. It’s an example animation of modeled historical and projected global temperature change from 1850 - 2100…

This post is based on our recent article (Reimer et al., in press) in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin…

Russell has tons of ops experience, mad coding skillz and 0 knowledge of geography. He loves hacking on open source, running meetups and arguing about startups…

The style I use:…

IT WAS A BUSY WEEK FOR ECONOMIC AND HOUSING DATA this week. Below are some data visaulizations I made tracking key trends in economic and housing market data. Homeowner equity increases to $12…

Dan Ciruli is a product manager at Google who works on Cloud Endpoints and API infrastructure. He used to play a lot of ultimate when he had knees and write a lot of software when he had time. He’ll try to speak Spanish to you if you give him a chance…

This is how to install Tree on macOS in the Terminal.app. It assumes Homebrew is installed…

Encouraged by a conversation with Andy @ Udacity, I made the decision to start a technical coding blog with a focus on helping me to learn more and document my coding journey. I did waver if this was the right thing to do but this and this helped convince me to go ahead. The next decision was then how to set-up it all up…

First, some context. I have blogged before. For several years I blogged on cycling (road, mountain biking, and as a means of simply getting from A to B). I stopped it in the end because it was very time consuming. Not just the writing but the maintenance of my self-hosted WordPress site…

In a previous post I introduced and discussed about an open source library I authored called Servant. Servant is a framework for building RPC-style services with Python. Servant is to services as Django or Rails is to web applications…it’s framework you’d use when you need to build a service in Python…

I’ve been using the Docker for Windows beta lately and things have been going rather smoothly. I got tired of typing docker-compose all the time, though, so I dug around a bit and figured out how to create PowerShell aliases to shorten this long command into the much easier dc…

IN MY PREVIOUS POST we looked at the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) data and plotted a Beveridge Curve…

Brandon Philips is helping to build modern server infrastructure at CoreOS as CTO. Prior to CoreOS, he worked at Rackspace hacking on cloud monitoring and was a Linux kernel developer at SUSE. As a graduate of Oregon State’s Open Source Lab he is passionate about open source technologies. A Stack of Stuff for …

I spent the better part of Saturday working on my latest personal project. Things were going alright within the limitations of using Django for routing and page rendering…

IN THIS POST WE’LL LOOK AT recent job openings and hires data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS)…

OpenML stands for Open Machine Learning and is an online platform, which aims at supporting collaborative machine learning online. It is an Open Science project that allows its users to share data, code and machine learning experiments…

Umesh Shankar is a Principal Engineer based in New York, focusing on security and privacy. He created and continues to lead the Data Protection effort at Google, working to keep users’ data safe in Google apps and on Google Cloud Platform. He routinely works with teams across the company on security and privacy design, and is actively involved in trying to improve security on the web…

The Serverless Framework hit v1.0 (beta) recently after about a year of development…

EARLIER THIS WEEK THE U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS released data on consumer expenditures in 2015. In this post I want to examine these data and make a few visualizations…

TL;DR: Just take me to the good stuff! A project I’ve started working on has required me once again to jump into the fun-filled world that is internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n)…

In R Markdown one is often faced with situations where a value that can vary substantially in automatically pulled out. For example, we might want to pull a p-value out of an linear model object. It’s a chore to have to manually edit p-values so that they conform with reporting conventions (e.g. p < .001)…

Tim is a co-founder of Descartes Labs focuses on building distributed systems using cloud architecture to better see how the earth changes every day…

Github Pages is incredibly useful for hosting pages with largely static content…

IN THIS POST WE’LL REVIEW some recent economic and housing market trends…

WE ARE GOING TO EXAMINE THE DISTRIBUTION OF US POPULATION and make an animated gif combining a map and a kernel density estimate of the distribution of county population densities. Density of densities, or density squared…

S3 is informal and ad hoc, but it has a certain elegance in its minimalism: you can’t take away any part of it and still have a useful [Object Oriented] system. I’m excited to see feedback from the R Journal, hopefully I didn’t miss something terribly important about S3…

I’ve started listening to the Talk Python To Me podcast recently in an effort to keep up on developments in the Python community…

IN THIS POST I’M JUST GOING TO share a few data visualizations I’ve been working on today. For most, no code, but these build off my previous posts here and here so you can check there for hints and I’ll post some more examples with code later…

Rodeo FX is very well known for their work on Game of Thrones, Deadpool, and many others. I recommend watching this demo video to get an idea of their talent…

Or a less clickbaity title: Model based optimization of machine learning models with mlr and mlrMBO. I recently participated in the #TEFDataChallenge a datathon organized by Wayra…

I got inspired by the book “The 1 Thing” and changed a little bit my behavior about work and training I’d like to share here to discuss and improve…

SOMETIMES YOU ACTUALLY LEARN SOMETHING from social media. Today on Twitter I happened across this Tweet via @kyle_e_walker: Anybody want population estimates for every US county & metro back to 1790? Well, here are mine. Have fun!https://t[... ](http://lenkiefer.com/2016/08/23/us-pop-map-1790-2010/)

In February I was lucky to receive funding from SSA to attend the two-day event Science Meets Parliament, held in Canberra. Science Meets parliament brings together 200 scientists to learn about research communication, the role of research in policy, and how to engage a…

Learners use hyperparameters to achieve better performance on particular datasets…

IN THIS POST I WANT TO DOCUMENT some R code I’ve recently been working on combining maps and distribution plots. As I discussed earlier lots of interesting data will be released in the fall and I want to be ready for it. Some of these snippets can be recycled when the new data is available…

On August 10th Cevo’s Hannah Browne joined Miguel Wood, Nicola Hazell and Geoff Gourley in a daring discussion hosted by Girls in Tech Australia about diversity in…

No code, just some gifs: Comparing mortgage rates by week (2014, 2015,2016) Annotated history of mortgage…

AUGUST IS ALMOST OVER, and it’s nearly back to school season. And that means one thing. No, not that we’re about to get a chance to watch the #1 NCAA football program of all time dominate the gridiron (though that’s awesome too)…

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to my new website! I mean site url, content and topics are still the same but but now I use Hugo instead of Wordpress. Why change Speed: my website got slower and slower. Static pages are fast, very fast. Easy of use: I started to use markdown to write posts then copy&paste them in Wordpress via browser…

He also wrote Driving Technical Change for Pragmatic Bookshelf, a book that arms technology professionals with the tools to convince reluctant co-workers to adopt new tools and technology…

A FEW DAYS AGO I POSTED on trends in household debt using data from the the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s Consumer Credit Panel…

The mlr developer team is quite international: Germany, USA, Canada. The time difference between these countries sometimes makes it hard to communicate and develop new features…

Recently I added Ahead-of-Time (AoT) compilation support to angular-seed and got a lot of questions about the new feature…

OVER THE PAST THREE MONTHS I HAVE MADE several new house price visualizations…

In light of the #CensusFail the ABS delivered to us on Tuesday night, I thought I’d put a blog post where my mouth is and suggest an architecture I feel would have delivered had Cevo been involved in the creation of this years’ Census…

There are already some benchmarking studies about different classification algorithms out there. The probably most well known and most extensive one is the Do we Need Hundreds of Classifers to Solve Real World Classication Problems? paper…

Learners use features to make predictions but how those features are used is often not apparent. mlr can estimate the dependence of a learned function on a subset of the feature space using generatePartialDependenceData…

Before joining Google, Paul founded a startup which was acquired by Microsoft, where he worked on DirectX, Xbox, Xbox Live, and Forza Motorsport, before spending time working on machine learning problems at Microsoft…

TODAY the NEW YORK FEDERAL RESERVE BANK released its Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit. These data come from the Center for Microeconomic Data based on credit records from Equifax…

Customer Overview MYOB is a leading provider of business management solutions in Australia and New Zealand…

Cisco ASA memory problem ASA doesn’t boot: Launching BootLoader… Default configuration file contains 1 entry. Searching / for images to boot. Loading /asa825-k8.bin… Booting… Press ESC to interrupt boot: Use BREAK or ESC to interrupt boot…

Mark will be at the Indie Game…

Three products are now General…

These commands (after the first one) work in the ed editor…

This demonstration is part of a requirement for my statistical consulting class at UT Austin. I will go through the basics of bootstrapping time series data using three different resampling methods…

Everyday statisticians, analysts and data enthusiasts perform data analysis for different purposes. But when it comes to presenting analyses to wider audience, the good work is not the complex one with big words…

In the post “Building an Angular 2 Application for Production” we explored how we can decrease the bundle size of a “Hello world!” application to from about 1.6M (non-minified & uncompressed) to 49K! We did this by using the following techniques: Angular offline template compiler for generating tree-shakable code. Tree-shaking of ES2015 modules with rollup…

What are all the ways you can set environment…

Did you know Travis CI ran on Google Cloud Platform? Francesc will be in GopherCon next week, not this one…