This strip from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is the best description of survival bias I've come across. It's a pernicious problem in day-to-day decision-making. Modern, sensationalist news reporting reinforces it. Frightening, surprising. "man bites dog" stories survive. Stories about everyday dangers end up in the bin. When I was a child, my parents would tell me to go to school through … [Read more...]
RIP polling
Polling died last night. It's been terminally ill for a while now. The predictions for the UK general election in 2015 were abysmal. Brexit polls were unreliable. And polls put the Scottish independence referendum result in 2014 as a close call when it was a resounding "No". After its performance in last night's US presidential election, we have to reach for the life support switch. Here are … [Read more...]
Visualizing election results
The New York Times published an article today on how it has mapped election results over the years. It illustrates the challenges of trying to present complex information succinctly to a lay, and possibly hostile, audience. As they note, simply shading the states of the US based on the party that it voted for makes the country look decidedly Republican. A timely reminder, if we needed it, of the … [Read more...]
Sharing R code using R-Fiddle
If you want to share a snippet of R code with others---e.g. for teaching or to get help on Stack Overflow---consider using R-Fiddle. While gists are good for basic code sharing, R-Fiddle allows others to execute the code in place. You can even embed the code together with a working R console in blog posts (as an iframe). … [Read more...]
RStudio 1.0 released
RStudio have released version 1.0 of their eponymous R IDE. They are calling it their ...biggest [release] ever! It certainly has a number of very significant features. Integrated support for Spark Spark and R are core tools for data scientists. While Spark has an R API, support for the machine learning libraries is lagging. So, it's great to hear that RStudio now has integrated support … [Read more...]