Reflecting on the art of Norwood Viviano — One of the first things I wanted to do after receiving my COVID-19 vaccination was to visit a museum (with masks and social distancing, of course), and my first such visit was to The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas. While milling about the galleries, I was immediately struck…

10 key ways data roles are different in an institution where data scientists don’t exist — There are so many articles and social media posts out there attempting to define the difference between data analyst and data scientist roles, a goal that I’ve never quite understood. This distinction varies so widely from industry to industry and company to company that it seems impossible to draw clear…

Exploring functionality beyond clean_names() — The janitor Package The janitor package is available on CRAN and was created by Sam Firke, Bill Denney, Chris Haid, Ryan Knight, Malte Grosser, and Jonathan Zadra. While arguably best known for its extraordinarily useful clean_names() function (which I will be covering later on in this article), the janitor package has a wide…

Conceptual overview and step by step guide for beginners — Shiny is used by many data scientists and data analysts to create interactive visualizations and web applications. While Shiny is an RStudio product and quite user-friendly, the development of a Shiny app differs significantly from the data visualization and exploration that you might do via the tidyverse in an RMarkdown…

Step by step guide with screenshots — It’s fairly straightforward to set up a GitHub connection when creating a new R project. Sometimes, however, you end up with a repo that is only stored locally. …

Why we need to rethink traditional polling — I published an analysis back in October in which I used Google searches to predict the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. I was largely focused on six swing states — Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. …

How to use scatterplots, correlation coefficients, and linear regression effectively — One of the most common analyses conducted by data scientists is the evaluation of linear relationships between numeric variables. These relationships can be visualized using scatterplots, and this step should be taken regardless of any further analyses that are conducted. …

Opportunities and Advancements — Healthcare data science has been growing rapidly for several years, although the use of data to understand and address mental health problems has lagged behind the rest of the field. In many ways, however, mental health is perfectly suited for data science approaches: the burden of mental illness in the…

What the polls may have missed — Background Most of us here in the U.S. are waiting with bated breath for the results of next week’s enormously consequential presidential election. Virtually all of the data providing insight into the likely outcome comes in the form of polling data, which, while extremely valuable, is also inherently imperfect. Selection bias…