LIVE DataTalk on HR Analytics Tonight: Using Machine Learning to Predict Employee Turnover

    Written by Matt Dancho on October 26, 2017

    Tonight at 7PM EST, we will be giving a LIVE #DataTalk on Using Machine Learning to Predict Employee Turnover. Employee turnover (attrition) is a major cost to an organization, and predicting turnover is at the forefront of needs of Human Resources (HR) in many organizations. Until now the mainstream approach has been to use logistic regression or survival curves to model employee attrition. However, with advancements in machine learning (ML), we can now get both better predictive performance and better explanations of what critical features are linked to employee attrition. We used two cutting edge techniques: the h2o package’s new FREE automatic machine learning algorithm, h2o.automl(), to develop a predictive model that is in the same ballpark as commercial products in terms of ML accuracy. Then we used the new lime package that enables breakdown of complex, black-box machine learning models into variable importance plots. The talk will cover HR Analytics and how we used R, H2O, and LIME to predict employee turnover.

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    Demo Week: Tidy Forecasting with sweep

    Written by Matt Dancho on October 25, 2017

    We’re into the third day of Business Science Demo Week. Hopefully by now you’re getting a taste of some interesting and useful packages. For those that may have missed it, every day this week we are demo-ing an R package: tidyquant (Monday), timetk (Tuesday), sweep (Wednesday), tibbletime (Thursday) and h2o (Friday)! That’s five packages in five days! We’ll give you intel on what you need to know about these packages to go from zero to hero. Today is sweep, which has broom-style tidiers for forecasting. Let’s get going!

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    Demo Week: Time Series Machine Learning with timetk

    Written by Matt Dancho on October 24, 2017

    We’re into the second day of Business Science Demo Week. What’s demo week? Every day this week we are demoing an R package: tidyquant (Monday), timetk (Tuesday), sweep (Wednesday), tibbletime (Thursday) and h2o (Friday)! That’s five packages in five days! We’ll give you intel on what you need to know about these packages to go from zero to hero. Second up is timetk, your toolkit for time series in R. Here we go!

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    Demo Week: class(Monday) <- tidyquant

    Written by Matt Dancho on October 23, 2017

    We’ve got an exciting week ahead of us at Business Science: we’re launching our first ever Business Science Demo Week. Every day this week we are demoing an R package: tidyquant (Monday), timetk (Tuesday), sweep (Wednesday), tibbletime (Thursday) and h2o (Friday)! That’s five packages in five days! We’ll give you intel on what you need to know about these packages to go from zero to hero. First up is tidyquant, our flagship package that’s useful for financial and time series analysis. Here we go!

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    It's tibbletime v0.0.2: Time-Aware Tibbles, New Functions, Weather Analysis and More

    Written by Davis Vaughan on October 8, 2017

    Today we are introducing tibbletime v0.0.2, and we’ve got a ton of new features in store for you. We have functions for converting to flexible time periods with the ~period formula~ and making/calculating custom rolling functions with rollify() (plus a bunch more new functionality!). We’ll take the new functionality for a spin with some weather data (from the weatherData package). However, the new tools make tibbletime useful in a number of broad applications such as forecasting, financial analysis, business analysis and more! We truly view tibbletime as the next phase of time series analysis in the tidyverse. If you like what we do, please connect with us on social media to stay up on the latest Business Science news, events and information!

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    It's tibbletime: Time-Aware Tibbles

    Written by Davis Vaughan on September 7, 2017

    We are very excited to announce the initial release of our newest R package, tibbletime. As evident from the name, tibbletime is built on top of the tibble package (and more generally on top of the tidyverse) with the main purpose of being able to create time-aware tibbles through a one-time specification of an “index” column (a column containing timestamp information). There are a ton of useful time functions that we can now use such as time_filter(), time_summarize(), tmap(), as_period() and time_collapse(). We’ll walk through the basics in this post.

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    alphavantager: An R interface to the Free Alpha Vantage Financial Data API

    Written by Matt Dancho on September 3, 2017

    We’re excited to announce the alphavantager package, a lightweight R interface to the Alpha Vantage API! Alpha Vantage is a FREE API for retreiving real-time and historical financial data. It’s very easy to use, and, with the recent glitch with the Yahoo Finance API, Alpha Vantage is a solid alternative for retrieving financial data for FREE! It’s definitely worth checking out if you are interested in financial analysis. We’ll go through the alphavantager R interface in this post to show you how easy it is to get real-time and historical financial data. In the near future, we have plans to incorporate the alphavantager into tidyquant to enable scaling from one equity to many.

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    Tidy Time Series Analysis, Part 3: The Rolling Correlation

    Written by Matt Dancho on July 30, 2017

    In the third part in a series on Tidy Time Series Analysis, we’ll use the runCor function from TTR to investigate rolling (dynamic) correlations. We’ll again use tidyquant to investigate CRAN downloads. This time we’ll also get some help from the corrr package to investigate correlations over specific timespans, and the cowplot package for multi-plot visualizations. We’ll end by reviewing the changes in rolling correlations to show how to detect events and shifts in trend. If you like what you read, please follow us on social media to stay up on the latest Business Science news, events and information! As always, we are interested in both expanding our network of data scientists and seeking new clients interested in applying data science to business and finance. If interested, contact us.

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    BizSci Package Updates: Formerly timekit... Now timetk :)

    Written by Matt Dancho on July 27, 2017

    We have several announcements regarding Business Science R packages. First, as of this week the R package formerly known as timekit has changed to timetk for time series tool kit. There are a few “breaking” changes because of the name change, and this is discussed further below. Second, the sweep and tidyquant packages have several improvements, which are discussed in detail below. Finally, don’t miss a beat on future news, events and information by following us on social media.

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