R - The Analytics Lab

Corporate identity graphics in R

This blog is about getting corporate identity graphics ready in R using ggplot. Many corporates have decent identity Powerpoint decks and Excel templates available to work with, they might even have developed a PowerBI/Tableau template to fit their corporate identity. Yet, identity templates for R (or other languages used) are often not readily available. Marketing […]

Natural Language Processing for predictive purposes with R

How to uncover the predictive potential of textual data using topic modeling, word embedding, transfer learning and transformer models with R Textual data is everywhere: reviews, customer questions, log files, books, transcripts, news articles, files, interview reports … Yet, texts are still (too) little involved in answering analysis questions, in addition to available structured data. […]

State of the Art in NLP: Transformers & BERT

In a sequence of articles we compare different NLP techniques to show you how we get valuable information from unstructured text. About a year ago we gathered reviews on Dutch restaurants. We were wondering whether ’the wisdom of the croud’ – reviews from restaurant visitors – could be used to predict which restaurants are most likely to receive a new Michelin-star. Read this post to see how that worked out. We used topic modeling as our primary tool to extract information from the review texts and combined that with predictive modeling techniques to end up with our predictions.

We got a lot of attention with our predictions and also questions about how we did the text analysis part. To answer these questions, we explain our approach in more detail in a series of articles on NLP. We didn’t stop exploring NLP techniques after our publication, and we also like to share insights from adding more novel NLP techniques. More specifically we will use two types of word embeddings – a classic Word2Vec model and a GLoVe embedding model – we’ll use transfer learning with pretrained word embeddings and we use transformers like BERT. We compare the added value of these advanced NLP techniques to our baseline topic model on the same dataset. By showing what we did and how we did it, we hope to guide others that are keen to use textual data for their own data science endeavours.

NLP: Using Word Embedding Models for Prediction Purposes

We got a lot of attention with our predictions and also questions about how we did the text analysis part. To answer these questions, we explain our approach in more detail in a series of articles on NLP. But we didn’t stop exploring NLP techniques after our publication, and we also like to share insights from adding more novel NLP techniques. More specifically we will use two types of word embeddings – a classic Word2Vec model and a GLoVe embedding model – we’ll use transfer learning with pretrained word embeddings and we use BERT. We compare the added value of these advanced NLP techniques to our baseline topic model on the same dataset. By showing what we did and how we did it, we hope to guide others that are keen to use textual data for their own data science endeavours.

NLP: Use Topic Modeling Results in Predictive Modeling

n a sequence of articles we compare different NLP techniques to show you how we get valuable information from unstructured text. About a year ago we gathered reviews on Dutch restaurants. We were wondering whether ’the wisdom of the croud’ – reviews from restaurant visitors – could be used to predict which restaurants are most likely to receive a new Michelin-star. Read this post to see how that worked out. We used topic modeling as our primary tool to extract information from the review texts and combined that with predictive modeling techniques to end up with our predictions.

We got a lot of attention with our predictions and also questions about how we did the text analysis part. To answer these questions, we explain our approach in more detail in a series of articles on NLP. But we didn’t stop exploring NLP techniques after our publication, and we also like to share insights from adding more novel NLP techniques. More specifically we will use two types of word embeddings – a classic Word2Vec model and a GLoVe embedding model – we’ll use transfer learning with pretrained word embeddings and we use BERT. We compare the added value of these advanced NLP techniques to our baseline topic model on the same dataset. By showing what we did and how we did it, we hope to guide others that are keen to use textual data for their own data science endeavours.

NLP: Word Embedding

We got a lot of attention with our predictions and also questions about how we did the text analysis part. To answer these questions, we explain our approach in more detail in a series of articles on NLP. We didn’t stop exploring NLP techniques after our publication, and we also like to share insights from adding more novel NLP techniques. More specifically we will use two types of word embeddings – a classic Word2Vec model and a GLoVe embedding model – we’ll use transfer learning with pretrained word embeddings and we use BERT. We compare the added value of these advanced NLP techniques to our baseline topic model on the same dataset. By showing what we did and how we did it, we hope to guide others that are keen to use textual data for their own data science endeavours.

NLP: Topic Modeling

We got a lot of attention with our predictions and also questions about how we did the text analysis part. To answer these questions, we will explain our approach in more detail in the coming articles. But we didn’t stop exploring NLP techniques after our publication, and we also like to share insights from adding more novel NLP techniques. More specifically we will use two types of word embeddings – a classic Word2Vec model and a GLoVe embedding model – we’ll use transfer learning with pretrained word embeddings and we use BERT. We compare the added value of these advanced NLP techniques to our baseline topic model on the same dataset. By showing what we did and how we did it, we hope to guide others that are keen to use textual data for their own data science endeavours.

Polygon plotting in R

As a data analyst you want to provide clear cut insights for your end users, enabling them to extract all the business value provided by your solution. If your end user is data and analytical savvy then explaining results might be a piece of cake. Unfortunately not all stakeholders are able to fully grab the […]

Let R/Python send messages when the algorithms are done training

As Data Scientists, we often train complex algorithms in order to tackle certain business problems and generate value. These algorithms, however, can take a while to train. Sometimes they take a couple of hours, hours which I’m not going to spend just sitting and waiting. But regularly checking whether the training is done, is also […]