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how-close-are-german-political-parties-to-each-other-using-r-to-derive-the-latent-semantic-network-of-german-election-manifestos

How close are German political parties to each other? Using R to derive the latent semantic network of German election manifestos

On September 24, the Germans will elect a new federal parliament. In this lesson, I text the campaign manifestos of the main parties, extract the hidden semantic space and visualize it to see who is closer to whom in German politics. How close are Germany’s election manifestos in meaning? If you want to know what …

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using-python-the-imdb-api-and-web-scraping-rotten-tomatoes-to-find-the-best-star-trek-movie

Using Python, the IMDb API, and web-scraping rotten tomatoes to find the best Star Trek movie

Star Trek is a very rare positive vision of the future. Which film attracts the audience the most with this encouraging message? I studied python to try every movie ratings I could find to answer this question. If you follow this guide, so can you. Which Star Trek movie is the best? The short answer …

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the-surprisingly-good-performance-of-dumb-classification-algorithms

The surprisingly good performance of dumb classification algorithms

When evaluating binary classification algorithms, it is recommended to have a baseline for performance metrics. In this blog post, I am calculating the classification efficiency of really stupid classifiers. These models do not use any feature information. If your own classification model works the same way, then a problem arises. Dumb classifiers When assessing how …

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the-tricky-question-of-how-long-it-takes-for-corona-cases-to-double

The tricky question of how long it takes for Corona cases to double

The doubling time of Covid-19 cases has become one of the key indicators of the corona pandemic. Political decision makers use this number to decide when isolation measures should be relaxed. In this post, I show that different assumptions about the virus outbreak lead to different doubling time estimates. Which number should you trust? Covid-19 …

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predicting-typical-completion-rates-of-online-courses

Predicting typical completion rates of online courses

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have not revolutionized education. Why? They suffer from terrible completion rates. Most students start a MOOC before completing it. In this blog post, I’ll take a look at what my own company’s eLearning completion rates would be if we offered standard MOOCs. How many people go through MOOCs? When I …

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exponentially-scaling-your-data-in-order-to-zoom-in-on-small-differences

Exponentially scaling your data in order to zoom in on small differences

Machine learning models benefit from scaling up the area of ​​the scale where most data points show differences. In this blog post, I present an exponential scaler that does just that. It increases the lower or upper end of the scale to focus the machine learning model on the differences that matter most. Design a …

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