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Welcome To My Data Blog

Hi I' am Pascal

Hi I' am Pascal

Thanks for checking out my blog. You can find all kinds of blog posts about R, Python, statistics, and R Shiny on here. Enjoy exploring and feel free to leave comments or message me directly at pascal.sfu.ca.  

 

I also created a website from scratch with Shiny at https://pascal-schmidt-ds.com where you can find my interactive resume and also some posts and personal projects. It is still under construction but will be finalized soon. 

Blog Posts

Vectorization, Purrr, and Mutate

Sometimes, R is a bit too intuitive, and I wondered what was wrong with my code the other day was. The problem was vectorized functions within a mutate statement. I usually use the paste function and the ifelse function within mutate so the vectorization is already automatic. However, for a specific task at work, I was working with a non… Read More

How I won an In-Class Kaggle Competition

During my 4th year as an undergraduate student in statistics, I took a Big Data class where we had to compete in a Kaggle competition. This competition was about imputing missing values in a times series weather data set, acquired from 76 different weather stations in the United Kingdom. The data set consisted of 1,880,892 rows and 11 columns. In… Read More

The Question That Got Me My First Data Analyst Job

In this blog post, we will be exploring how I answered a question that got me my first job as a data analyst. It was an open-ended question and was supposed to be answered in a casual/theoretical way. The question was “How would you collect all cities in Qatar and how I would make sure in which municipality the cities… Read More

My Path to My First Full-Time Data Science Job and Some Advice

In December 2019, I finished my Bachelors of Science in Statistics. I was happy that I am done with school for now but at the same time, I knew that the real challenge, securing a job, just began. In this blog post, I will be sharing my experience of how I got my first data science job after my undergraduate… Read More

Doing Row-wise Operations the Column-wise Way With tidyr pivot_longer

Row-wise operation always feel a bit strange and awkward to me. At the same time they are really fascinating as well because we mostly deal with column-wise operations. In this blog post, we will be going through a #tidytuesday data set that is about plastic and we will be doing row-wise operations the column-wise way with pivot_longer(). What we’ll be… Read More

Custom Message Handler in R Shiny – Resembling insertUI & removeUI

In April this year, I will have used R Shiny for a year. I am coming from a statistics background and the first programming language I learned was R and then Python. I am using R Shiny almost every week at work and I am amazed by how powerful it can be with no web development knowledge. Since I started,… Read More

Persistent Data Storage With a MySQL Database in R Shiny – An Example App

Last tutorial, we built a Shiny application where the user can add, delete, and edit specific row. Today we want to integrate a remote MySQL database for persistent data storage. When the user changes the anything of the table, the results are send to the MySQL database and will be loaded at the next session again. If you want to… Read More

Predicting Housing Prices with Natural Language Processing NLP and Tidymodels

In this tutorial, we will be predicting housing prices based on their descriptions. We will be using natural language processing, NLP, to build a machine learning model. We will be using bag of words with column vectors of ones and zeros. If you want to reproduce the analysis or check out the code, then you can find it on my… Read More

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