Identifying Custom Australian Licence Plates

Identifying Custom Australian Licence Plates

In case this saves anyone some time, here's a quick bit of regex and Python code for identifying if a given licence plate is standard or custom (personalised) in a given state. In case this saves anyone some time, here's a quick bit of regex and Python code for identifying if a given licence plat......

Machine Learning Workflows with Julia

Machine Learning Workflows with Julia

I have a simple machine learning workflow that I recreate whenever I'm testing something new. I take some interesting data and a target, throw in some pre-processing, tune hyperparameters with cross-validation, and train a random forest. It's all the basic ingredients for a machine learning model......

Determining system dependencies for R projects

Determining system dependencies for R projects

Locking down R package dependencies and versions is a solved problem, thanks to the easy-to-use renv package. System dependencies --- those Linux packages that need to be installed to make certain R packages work --- are a bit harder to manage. Locking down R package dependencies and versions i......

First Impressions of Julia from an R User

First Impressions of Julia from an R User

It's no secret that I love R and begrudgingly use Python. But there's a another option for data science, and it promises the speed of C with the ease of use of R/Python. That language is Julia, and it's a delight to use. I took some time to learn the basics, and I'm sharing my impressions here.......

Sourcing Data from S3 with Drake

Sourcing Data from S3 with Drake

drake is a package for orchestrating R workflows. Suppose I have some data in S3 that I want to pull into R through a drake plan. In this post I'll use the S3 object's ETag to make drake only re-download the data if it's changed. [drake is a package f...