ISSUE 370 · January 18, 2022
Trends
Google Research: Themes from 2021 and Beyond
In this annual retrospective, Jeff Dean takes a look at the state of machine learning in 2021 and highlights five key trends that are poised to make big impacts around the world. This is an awesome post with lots of links to explore along the way.
Google AI Blog | Jeff Dean
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Tutorials, Projects & Opinions
Data Mishaps Night
Thursday, Feb 24th @ 7pm CST
The second annual Data Mishaps Night features a lineup of "data mistake" stories with a focus on the human aspect of data work and lessons learned the hard way. Learn about projects that have been bungled, data roads not taken, missed commas killing pipelines, and all the rest. And if you have a mishap of your own to share, apply now!
Data Mishaps Night
State of machine learning in Julia
Great discussion on the Julia Discourse about the current state of machine learning in Julia and where things are going. Covers things like where Julia really shines today, commonly used packages, what's lacking, issues, performance and much more.
Julia Discourse | started by Seth Axen
Using databases with Shiny
Many Shiny users know how to query existing databases but there's a lot more involved in creating and managing your own. In this step-by-step guide, Emily Riederer shows how to get started and, especially, how to think through things like security and performance.
Emily Riederer
Saving the Scranton Branch with Lead Scoring
This is a fun, introductory tutorial that shows to build a lead scoring model built using logistic regression.
Will Crowley
PostHog: Open-source Product Analytics
Join thousands of other developers who use PostHog to build better products and analyse user behaviour. You can deploy PostHog on your infrastructure to unlock the power of open-source product analytics and session recording, essentially replacing multiple tools at once.
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Code & Tools
xmanager
XManager is an open-source platform for packaging, running and keeping track of ML experiments. Launch experiments locally or on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) using XManager's APIs with Python.
GitHub | deepmind
Resources
Bayesian Modeling and Computation in Python
Nice introduction to Bayesian statistics aimed at helping beginner Bayesian practitioners become intermediate modelers. This is a hands-on text with examples using PyMC3, Tensorflow Probability, ArviZ, etc.
Osvaldo Martin, Ravin Kumar, Junpeng Lao
Statistical Rethinking
This online course teaches data analysis, with a focus on scientific models first. The course prioritizes conceptual, causal models and forming precise questions about those models. The course filled up fast but slides and lectures are posted online each week.
GitHub | Richard McElreath
Data Visualization
Fooled by Beautiful Data
A "beautiful" plot isn't just about aesthetics. This preprint explores four studies that show how people commonly (mis)place trust in more beautiful graphs.
PsyArXiv | Chujun Lin, Mark Thornton
A ggplot2 Tutorial for Beautiful Plotting in R
Awesome ggplot2 tutorial with lots of examples. Includes a linked Table of Contents and useful resources at the end. This was featured in Data Elixir when it came out in 2019 but it's been substantially updated since then and it was recently plagiarized. This is the version you want!
Cédric Scherer
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