This post is a bit interdisciplinary. It stems from a back and forth that I had on X about ways of computing the Fibonacci numbers. I learned something new in that interaction, and I thought that it would be a wonderful opportunity to demonstrate some cool math and some cool R programming. If you already know the math, you might learn something about R. If you already know about R, you might learn…
I often find myself needing to write functions to make API calls in R. This tends to involve a lot of boilerplate and repetition. The {wrapify} package is an attempt to abstract as much as possible of that boilerplate away in a declarative way. The package code is available on Github , and the package can be installed with devtools::install_github("colin-fraser/wrapify") . First example: OpenAI…
I wrote a tweet recently complaining about how it’s hard to estimate how many of what kind of posts there are. You guys really have no idea how hard it is to estimate how many of what kind of posts there are — Colin Fraser ( @colin_fraser ) October 16, 2024 This was a rare window on X into my professional life, which involves estimating how many posts are against the rules on the social media app…
This was originally posted on Medium . If you ask ChatGPT who it is, you’ll get some variation of the following standardized spiel. The bot will tell you that it is “a language model developed by OpenAI” designed to perform such-and-such helpful tasks and so on. This assertion is easy enough to take at face value. The notion of a talking computer is pretty familiar; we’ve been talking to Alexa and…
TL;DR How to balance false positive rates and false negative rates is a problem that confronts anyone who does anything with machine learning, or even predicting more generally In this post, I explore how to make an optimal choice of FPR and FNR given your relative valuation of a false positive and a false negative I found it surprising that the optimal choice is determined not only by your…