DataRobot Blog

We just wrapped up a busy week in Los Angeles at the R User Conference 2014. The four-day event was very well done, and the quality of attendees we met throughout the conference was outstanding. This is an event that will definitely be on our annual calendar! DataRobot and R User Conference Our own Xavier Conort spoke about Ten R…

Deep learning has been all over the news lately. In a presentation I gave at Boston Data Festival 2013 and at a recent PyData Boston meet-up I provided some history of the method and a sense of what it is being used for presently. This post aims to cover the first half of that presentation, focusing on the question of…

We just returned from a great weekend in Menlo Park, CA (at Facebook’s HQ) where we attended PyData Silicon Valley 2014. The conference brought together top users and developers of data analysis tools in Python. It was a great place to share ideas on how to best apply the language and tools to address challenges in data management, processing, analytics…

We are often asked about how to get started in data science. While there are more and more training courses and programs out there that can cost significant amounts of money, we have found that some of the best resources available are free. We are planning to put together a comprehensive step by step guide for learning data science using…

Gradient Boosted Regression Trees (GBRT) or shorter Gradient Boosting is a flexible non-parametric statistical learning technique for classification and regression. This notebook shows how to use GBRT in scikit-learn, an easy-to-use, general-purpose toolbox for machine learning in Python. We will start by giving a brief introduction to scikit-learn and its GBRT interface. The bulk of the tutorial will show how…

This short tutorial will not only guide you through some basic data analysis methods but it will also show you how to implement some of the more sophisticated techniques available today. We will look into traffic accident data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and try to predict fatal accidents using state-of-the-art statistical learning techniques. If you are interested,…

This short tutorial will not only guide you through some basic data analysis methods but it will also show you how to implement some of the more sophisticated techniques available today. We will look into traffic accident data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and try to predict fatal accidents using state-of-the-art statistical learning techniques.  If you are interested, download…

Earlier we covered Ordinary Least Squares regression. In this posting we will build upon this foundation and introduce an important extension to linear regression, regularization, that makes it applicable for ill-posed problems (e.g. number of predictors >> number of samples) and helps to prevent overfitting. This is part of a series of blog posts showing how to do common statistical…

This post looks into the problem of classification, a situation in which a response is a categorical variable. We will build upon the techniques that we previously discussed in the context of regression and show how they can be transferred to classification problems. This post introduces a number of classification techniques, and it will try to convey their corresponding strengths…