Rblog

Deep Learning Dude pt 1

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You’ve probably noticed that Deep Learning is all the rage right now. AlphaGo has beaten the world champion at Go, you can google cat photos and be sure you won’t accidentally get photos of canines, and many other near-miraculous feats: all enabled by Deep Learning with neural nets. (I am thinking of coining the phrase “laminar learning” to add some panache to old-school non-deep learning.)

I do a lot of my work in R, and it turns out that not one but two R packages have recently been released that enable R users to use the famous Python-based deep learning package, Keras: keras and kerasR.

model2

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R Users Will Now Inevitably Become Bayesians

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There are several reasons why everyone isn’t using Bayesian methods for regression modeling. One reason is that Bayesian modeling requires more thought: you need pesky things like priors, and you can’t assume that if a procedure runs without throwing an error that the answers are valid. A second reason is that MCMC sampling — the bedrock of practical Bayesian modeling — can be slow compared to closed-form or MLE procedures. A third reason is that existing Bayesian solutions have either been highly-specialized (and thus inflexible), or have required knowing how to use a generalized tool like BUGS, JAGS, or Stan. This third reason has recently been shattered in the R world by not one but two packages: brms and rstanarm. Interestingly, both of these packages are elegant front ends to Stan, via rstan and shinystan.

This article describes brms and rstanarm, how they help you, and how they differ.

BRMS Diagnostic 1
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Where’s the Magic? (EMD and SSA in R)

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When I first heard of SSA (Singular Spectrum Analysis) and the EMD (Empirical Mode Decomposition) I though surely I’ve found a couple of magical methods for decomposing a time series into component parts (trend, various seasonalities, various cycles, noise). And joy of joys, it turns out that each of these methods is implemented in R packages: Rssa and EMD.

In this posting, I’m going to document some of my explorations of the two methods, to hopefully paint a more realistic picture of what the packages and the methods can actually do. (At least in the hands of a non-expert such as myself.)

spiro2
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Fun with R and HMM’s

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I’m always intrigued by techniques that have cool names: Support Vector Machines, State Space Models, Spectral Clustering, and an old favorite Hidden Markov Models (HMM’s). While going through some of my notes, I stumbled onto a fun experiment with HMM’s where you feed a bunch of English text into a two-state HMM and it will (tend to) discover what letters are vowels.
bw1
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Electricity Usage in a High-rise Condo Complex pt 4

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This is the fourth article in the series, where the techiness builds to a crescendo. If this is too statistical/programming geeky for you, the next posting will return to a more investigative and analytical flavor. Last time, we looked at a fixed-effects model:

m.fe <- lm (dollars ~ 1 + regime + ratetemp * I(dca - 55))

which looks like a plausible model and whose parameters are all statistically significant. A question that might arise is: why not use a hierarchical (AKA multilevel, mixed-effects) model instead? While we’re at it, why not go full-on Bayesian as well? It just so happens that there is a great new tool called Stan which fits the bill and which also has an rstan package for R.

stan1
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