R

College Rankings and Pay

College rankings are a standard input for most students when choosing a school. But to what extent does a college's rank relate to how much a graduate makes 10 years into their career? We'll answer this question by web scraping data from a variety of online sources with R and Python, and then build a model to understand which factors matter most to post-college pay.

Causal Inference with Propensity Scores

This post highlights one approach to generating causal inferences with observational data. We’ll first walk through some of the basics of causal inference and propensity scores, followed by a practical example that brings these concepts together. At the end of this post, you should have a solid understanding of how propensity scores can be used in the real world to guide decision-making

Choosing a Fantasy Football Kicker with Emperical Bayes Estimation

We'll use 50 years of NFL kicking data to inform the least -- or most -- important decision of your fantasy season: Drafting a kicker.

The State of Names in America

In this post, we'll leverage 110 years of historical data -- and everything from time-series forecasting to hypothesis testing -- to understand how one's state of birth influences their name

The Optimal Portland Pub Crawl

Portland, Oregon is home to some of the best watering holes in America. With so many places to quaff a West Coast Style IPA or glass of Pinot Noir, choosing which to visit (and in which order) can be a daunting task. To address this question, we'll leverage some classic optimization techniques to minimize the total distance travelled between the top bars in Portland for a truly "optimal" Pub Crawl.

Choosing a Fantasy Football Quarterback

Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady? Carson Wentz or Drew Brees? Choosing the right Fantasy Football QB each week is challenging. To remove some of the guesswork from the decision-making process, I devised an approach that’s worked well over the past few seasons. Read on to learn more about using the Beta Distribution to pick your weekly starting QB.