Category: report

Reviewing year 4 of paulvanderlaken.com

Despite the pandemic, 2020 has been a great year for me.

Professionally, I grew into my role as data science product owner. And next to this, I got more and more freelance side gigs. Mostly teaching, but also some consultancy projects. Unfortunately, all my start-up ideas failed miserably again this year, yet I’ll keep trying : )

Personally, 2020 was also generous to us. We have a family expansion coming in 2021! (Un)Fortunately, the whole quarantaine situation provided a lot of time to make our house baby-ready!

A year in numbers

2020 was also a great year for our blog.

Here are some statistics. We reached 300 followers, on the last day of the year! Who could have imagined that?!

Statistic	2019	2020	delta
Views	107.828	150.599	40%
Visitors	70.870	100.539	42%
Followers	159	300	89%
Posts	96	72	-25%
Comments	40	59	48%
per post	0,42	0,82	97%
Likes	116	86	-26%
per post	1,21	1,19	-1%

This tremendous growth of the website is despite me posting a lot less frequently this year.

After a friend’s advice, I started posting less, but more regularly.

Can you spot the pattern in my 2020 posting behavior?

Compare that to my erratic 2019 posting:

Now my readers have got something to look forward to every Tuesday!

Yet, is Tuesday really the best day for me to post my stuff?

You seem to prefer visiting my blog on Wednesdays.

Let me know what you think in the comments!

I am looking forward to what 2021 has in store for my blogging. I guess a baby will result in even less posts… But we’ll just focus on quality over quantity!

I hope I can keep up with the exponential growth:

Best new articles in 2020

There are many ways in which you could define the quality of an article.

For me, the most obvious would be to look at some view-based metric. Something like the number of views, or the number of unique visitors.

Yet, some articles have been online longer than others. So maybe we should focus on the average views per day. Still these you can expect to be increase as articles have been in existance longer.

In my opinion, how an article attract viewers over time tells an interesting story. For instance, how stable are the daily viewer numbers? Are they rising? This is often indicative that external websites link to my article. Which implies it holds valuable information to a specific readership. In turn, this suggests that the article is likely to continue attracting viewers in the future.

Here is an abstract visualization. Every line represents and article. Every line/article starts in the lower left corner. On the x-axis you see the number of days since posting. So lines slowly move right, the longer they have been on my website. On the y-axis you see the total viewers it attracted.

You can see three types of blog articles: (1) articles that attract 90% of their views within the first month, (2) articles that generate a steady flow of visitors, (3) articles that never attract (m)any readers.

Here’s a different way of visualizing those same articles: by their average daily visitors (x) and the standard deviation in daily visitors (y).

Basically, I hope to write articles that get many daily visitors (high x). Yet, I also hope that my articles have either have stable (or preferably increasing) visitor numbers. This would mean that they either score low on y, or that y increases over time.

By these measures, my best articles of 2020 are, in my opinion:

Best all time reads

For the first time, my blog roll & archives were the most visited page of my website this year! A whopping 13k views!!

With regard to the most visited pages of this year, not much has changed since 2019. We see some golden oldies and I once again conclude that my viewership remains mostly R-based:

Which articles haven’t you read?

Did you know you can search for keywords or tags using the main page?

Create a publication-ready correlation matrix, with significance levels, in R

TLDR; You can use the corrtable package (see CRAN or Github)!

In most (observational) research papers you read, you will probably run into a correlation matrix. Often it looks something like this:

In Social Sciences, like Psychology, researchers like to denote the statistical significance levels of the correlation coefficients, often using asterisks (i.e., *). Then the table will look more like this:

Table 4 from Family moderators of relation between community ...

Regardless of my personal preferences and opinions, I had to make many of these tables for the scientific (non-)publications of my Ph.D..

I remember that, when I first started using R, I found it quite difficult to generate these correlation matrices automatically.

Yes, there is the cor function, but it does not include significance levels.

Then there the (in)famous Hmisc package, with its rcorr function. But this tool provides a whole new range of issues.

What’s this storage.mode, and what are we trying to coerce again?

Soon you figure out that Hmisc::rcorr only takes in matrices (thus with only numeric values). Hurray, now you can run a correlation analysis on your dataframe, you think…

Yet, the output is all but publication-ready!

You wanted one correlation matrix, but now you have two… Double the trouble?

[UPDATED] To spare future scholars the struggle of the early day R programming, Laura Lambert and I created an R package corrtable, which includes the helpful function correlation_matrix.

This correlation_matrix takes in a dataframe, selects only the numeric (and boolean/logical) columns, calculates the correlation coefficients and p-values, and outputs a fully formatted publication-ready correlation matrix!

You can specify many formatting options in correlation_matrix.

For instance, you can use only 2 decimals. You can focus on the lower triangle (as the lower and upper triangle values are identical). And you can drop the diagonal values:

Or maybe you are interested in a different type of correlation coefficients, and not so much in significance levels:

For other formatting options, do have a look at the source code on github.

Now, to make matters even easier, the package includes a second function (save_correlation_matrix) to directly save any created correlation matrices:

Once you open your new correlation matrix file in Excel, it is immediately ready to be copy-pasted into Word!

If you are looking for ways to visualize your correlations do have a look at the packages corrr, corrplot, or ppsr.

I hope this package is of help to you!

Do reach out if you get to use them in any of your research papers!

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Top-19 articles of 2019

With only one day remaining in 2019, let’s review the year. 2019 was my third year of blogging and it went by even quicker than the previous two!

Personally, it has been a busy year for me: I started a new job, increased my speaking and teaching activities, bought and moved to my new house, and got married op top of that!

Fortunately, I also started working parttime. This way, I could still reserve some time for learning and sharing my learnings. And sharing I did:

I posted 95 blogs in 2019!
That means one new post every 4 days!

paulvanderlaken.com improved its online footprint as well. We received over 100k visitors in 2019! And many of you subscribed and sticked around. Our little community now includes 55 more members than it did last year! And that is not even including the followers to my new twitter bot Artificial Stupidity!

Thank you for your continued interest!

Join 1,405 other followers

Now, I am always curious as to what brings you to my website, so let’s have a look at some 2019 statistics (which I downloaded via my new Python scraper).

Most read articles

There is clearly a power distribution in the quantity with which you read my blogs.

Some blogs consistently attract dozens of visitors each day. Others have only handful of visitors over the course of a year.

These are the 19 articles which were most read in 2019. Hyperlinks are included below the bar chart. It’s a nice combination of R programming, machine learning, HR-related materials, and some entertainment (games & gambling) in between.

Which have and haven’t you read?

Rising stars

Half of these most read articles have actually been published in 2017 or ’18 already. However, of the 95 articles published in 2019, some also demonstrate promising visitor patterns:

The People Analytics books, Visual innovations, and AI Battleships are in the top 19, and several others made it too.

Some of these newer blogs haven’t had the time to mature and redeem their place yet though. Regardless, I have high hopes!

Particularly for Neural Synesthesia, which was easily one of my greatest WOW-moments for ML applications in 2019. It’s truly mesmerizing to see a GAN traverse its latent space.

Reading & posting patterns

I have been posting quite regularly throughout the year. Apart from a holiday to Thailand during the start of January, and the start of my new job in February.

While I write and post most of my blogs in the weekend, I guess I should consider postponing publishing. As you guys are mostly active during Tuesdays and Wedsnesdays!

Statistical summary of 2019

What better way to end 2019 than with a statistical summary?

I have posted more and shorter blogs, and you’ve rewarded me with visits and more likes (also per post). However, we need more discussion!

Statistic	2018	2019	Δ
Views	85614	107388	+25%
Unique visitors	57594	70615	+23%
Posts	61	95	+56%
Words / post	518	371	-40%
Likes	51	111	118%
Comments	24	16	-33%

As of 29/12/2019

2020 Outlook

It took some time to get started, but halfway 2017 my blog started attracting an audience. People stayed on during 2018, and visitor number continued to increase through 2019.

With an ongoing expansion from R into Python, and an increased focus on sharing resources, applications, and novelties related to data visualization and machine learning, I have a lot more in store for 2020!

I hope you stick around for the ride!

Please like, subscribe, share, and comment, and we’ll make sure 2020 will be at least as interesting and full of (machine) learning as 2019 has been!

Join 1,405 other followers

Zeit’s interactive visualization of the 2019 European election results

Zeit — the German newspaper — analyzed recent election results in over 80,000 regions of Europe. They discovered many patterns – from the radical left to the extremist right. Moreover, they allow you to find patterns yourself, among others in your own region.

They published the summarized election results in this beautiful interactive map of Europe.

Screenshot of https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2019-05/elections-in-europe-eu-countries-results-map-english

The map is beautifully color-coded for the dominant political view (Conservative, Green, Liberal, Socialist, Far left, or Far right) per region. Moreover, you can select these views and look for regions where they received respectively many votes. Like in the below, where I opted for the Liberal view, which finds strongest support in regions of the Netherlands, France, Czechia, Romania, Denmark, Estonia, and Finland.

Using the Liberal view, via https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2019-05/elections-in-europe-eu-countries-results-map-english

For instance, the region of Tilburg in the Netherlands — where I live — voted mostly Liberal, as depicted by the yellow Netherlands. In contrast, in the German border regions conservative and socialist parties received most votes, whereas in the Belgian border regions uncategorizable parties received most votes.

Zoomed in on Tilburg, via https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2019-05/elections-in-europe-eu-countries-results-map-english

Zeit discovered some cool patterns themselves as well, as discussed in the original article. These include:

Right-Wing Populists in Poland
North-South divides in Italy and Spain
Considerable support for regional parties in Catalonia, Belgium, Scotland and Italy
Dominant Green and Liberal views in the Netherlands, France, and Germany

Have a look yourself, it’s a great example of open access data-driven journalism!

Pimp my RMD: Tips for R Markdown – by Yan Holtz

R markdown creates interactive reports from R code, including interactive reports, documents, dashboards, presentations, and even books. Have a look at this awesome gallery of R markdown examples.

Yan Holtz recently created a neat little overview of handy R Markdown tips and tricks that improve the appearance of output documents. He dubbed this overview Pimp my RMD. Have a look, it’s worth it!

Via https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/authoring_quick_tour.html

Two years of paulvanderlaken.com

Yesterday was the second anniversary of my website. I also reflected on this moment last year, and I thought to continue the tradition in 2019.

Let me start with a great, big
THANK YOU
to all my readers for continuing to visit my website!

You are the reason I continue to write down what I read. And maybe even the reason I continued reading and learning last year, despite all other distractions [my “real” job and my PhD : )].

Also a big thank you to all my followers on Twitter and LinkedIn, and those who have taken the time to comment or like my blogs. All of you make that I gain energy from writing this blog!

With that said, let’s start the review of the past year on my blog.

Biggest failures of 2018

Where there’s success, there’s failure. Some of my posts did not get a lot of attention by my readership. That’s unfortunate, as I really only take the time to blog about the stuff that I deem interesting enough. Were these failed blog posts just unlucky, or am I biased and were they simply really bad and uninteresting?

You be the judge! Here are some of the least read posts of 2018:

A/B Testing a New Look received a meagre 4 views per month.
Interactive Explanation of Network and Graph Principles received 5 views/month.
Dragonflies and neural networks and Bellwoods: A procedurally generated game both received just 6 views per month.
7 tips for writing cleaner JavaScript code, translated to 3.5 tips for R programming only received 8 views/month, as did What to consider when choosing colors for data visualization
dygraphs and chatterplots, both new types of visualizations, received 9 views/month.
Finally, How to Design Your First Programs and Computers decode what humans see both received 10 views per month.

General statistics

Now, let’s move to some general statistics: in 2018, paulvanderlaken.com received 85.614 views, by 57.594 unique visitors. I posted 61 new blogs, consisting of a total of 31.598 words. Fifty-one visitors liked one of my posts, and 24 visitors took the time to post a comment of their own (my replies included, probably).

Compared to last year, my website did pretty well!

	2017	2018	Δ
Views	38490	85614	122%
Unique visitors	26949	57594	114%
Posts	100	61	-39%
Words / post	625	518	-17%
Likes	35	51	46%
Comments	99	24	-76%

However, the above statistics do not properly reflect the development of my website. For instance, I only really started generating traffic after my first viral post (i.e., Harry Plotter). The below graph takes that into account and better reflects the development of the traffic to my website.

The upward trend in traffic looks promising!

All time favorites

Looking back to the start of paulvanderlaken.com, let’s also examine which blogs have been performing well ever since their conception.

Clearly, most people have been coming for the R resources overview, as demonstrated by the visual below. Moreover, the majority of blog posts has not been visited much — only a handful ever cross the 1000 views mark.

The blogs that attracted a large public in 2017 (such as the original Harry Plotter and its sequal, and the Kaggle 2017 DS survey) have phased out a bit.

Fortunately, the introductory guide for newcomers to R is still kickstarting many programming careers! And on an additional positive note, more and more visitors seem to inspect the homepage and archives.

Redirected visitors

Finally , let’s have a closer look as to what brought people to my website.The below visualizes the main domains that redirected visitors.

Search engines provided the majority of traffic in both 2017 and 2018 –
mainly Google; to a lesser extent, DuckDuckGo and Bing (who in his right mind uses Norton Safe Search?!). My Twitter visitors increased in 2018 as compared to 2017, as did my traffic from this specific Quora page.

And that concludes my two year anniversary of paulvanderlaken.com review. I hope you enjoyed it, and that you will return to my website for the many more years to come : )

I end with a big shout out to my most loyal readers!
104 people have subscribed to my website (as of 2019-01-22)
and receive an update wherener I post a new blog.

Thank you for your continued support!

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Press the Follow button
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