I've spent time over the last few months attempting to enhance my skills in the statistical sub-field of causal inference.

Overly simplified, causal inference comprises a series of methodologies and techniques to assist analysts in making the jump from association or correlation to cause and effect.…

A poll released recently showed Python increasing its lead over R as the language of choice for analytics professionals. Setting aside questions of…

This is the third and (I promise) last of the series "A Little College Sports Analysis", wherein I attempt to use data from the Learfield Directors' Cup to evaluate the prowess…

Last time, I wrote on wrangling data from a pdf file to assemble a data set of D1 college athletic performance in the Learfield Directors' Cup competition. In this blog, I…

I'm a big college sports fan, especially active in debates about which D1 conference is best. Five years ago, I came across the Learfield Directors' Cup, an annual evaluation/ranking program of college sports…

After my last blog on the use of relational databases PostgreSQL and MonetDB to help compensate for R's RAM limitations, I received an email from a reader who…

In PostgreSQL, MonetDB, and Too-Big-for-Memory Data in R -- Part I, I began to discuss how data that was too big for RAM is handled in R, a memory-constrained statistical…

In a blog from three months ago, I wrote on "kind of" big data in R. The "kind of" was meant as a caveat that data size in R is limited by RAM. I also mentioned the potential of working with relational data stores for…

My daughter just started a business analytics Master's program. For the probability sequence of the core statistics course, one of her assignments is to calculate the probability of single …

I've got a big digital mouth. Last time, I wrote on frequencies using R, noting cavalierly that I'd done similar development in…

At a conference I attended a few years ago, a data scientist on a round table discussion replied to a question of what she considered the most important mathematical function in her work with: "the division operator". That clever response provided grist for my later answer to a similar question on…

Data Dictionary to Meta Data III is the third and final blog devoted to demonstrating the automation of meta data creation for the American Community Survey 2012-2016 household data set, using a published data dictionary. DDMDI was a teaser to show how Python could be used to generate R statements that…

My blog last…

My last DSC blog left me a bit disappointed. While the loads of the beefy household and population files for the American…

I met up with an old grad school friend a few weeks back. He's an accomplished professor of demography, basically the statistical study of populations, particularly surrounding births, deaths, and…

Several years ago, I came across a report that led me to a new …

It's that time of the year again -- the start of March Madness, 2018. Last Sunday, the selection show announced the 68 teams, and the preliminary round games start tonight. Of the 68 schools, 32 were automatically selected as conference champions, while the remaining 36 received at large…

Tuesday of Strata Data Conference is my favorite of the four days. The calm before the storm of the keynotes and short presentations of Wednesday-Thursday, Tuesday revolves on half day training sessions that afford reasonably deep dives into technical data science topics. This year my choices were…

Ask for feedback from just about any critic of the R statistical package and you'll hear two consistent responses: 1) R is a difficult language to learn, and 2) R's data size limitation to physical RAM consigns it to toy academic applications. Having worked with R for over 15 years, I probably shared those views to some extent early on, but no longer.

Yes, R's a language where array-oriented processing and functional…