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Machine learning, text analysis, and more

Word Vectors with tidy data principles

Last week I saw Chris Moody’s post on the Stitch Fix blog about calculating word vectors from a corpus of text using word counts and matrix factorization, and I was so excited! This blog post illustrates how to implement that approach to find word vector representations in R using tidy data principles and sparse matrices. Word vectors, or word embeddings, are typically calculated using neural networks; that is what word2vec is.

October 30, 2017

From Power Calculations to P-Values: A/B Testing at Stack Overflow

Note: cross-posted with the Stack Overflow blog. If you hang out on Meta Stack Overflow, you may have noticed news from time to time about A/B tests of various features here at Stack Overflow. We use A/B testing to compare a new version to a baseline for a design, a machine learning model, or practically any feature of what we do here at Stack Overflow; these tests are part of our decision-making process.

October 17, 2017

Mapping ecosystems of software development

I have a new post on the Stack Overflow blog today about the complex, interrelated ecosystems of software development. On the data team at Stack Overflow, we spend a lot of time and energy thinking about tech ecosystems and how technologies are related to each other. One way to get at this idea of relationships between technologies is tag correlations, how often technology tags at Stack Overflow appear together relative to how often they appear separately.

October 3, 2017

tidytext 0.1.4

I am pleased to announce that tidytext 0.1.4 is now on CRAN! This release of our package for text mining using tidy data principles has an excellent collection of delightfulness in it. First off, all the important functions in tidytext now support support non-standard evaluation through the tidyeval framework. library(janeaustenr) library(tidytext) library(dplyr) input_var <- quo(text) output_var <- quo(word) data_frame(text = prideprejudice) %>% unnest_tokens(!! output_var, !! input_var) ## # A tibble: 122,204 x 1 ## word ## <chr> ## 1 pride ## 2 and ## 3 prejudice ## 4 by ## 5 jane ## 6 austen ## 7 chapter ## 8 1 ## 9 it ## 10 is ## # .

September 30, 2017

Sentiment analysis using tidy data principles at DataCamp

NOTE: Read more here about why I no longer recommend taking my courses at DataCamp. I’ve been developing a course at DataCamp over the past several months, and I am happy to announce that it is now launched! The course is Sentiment Analysis in R: the Tidy Way and I am excited that it is now available for you to explore and learn from. This course focuses on digging into the emotional and opinion content of text using sentiment analysis, and it does this from the specific perspective of using tools built for handling tidy data.

August 24, 2017