/ Recent content on Giovanni Colitti Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Sat, 16 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /about/ Mon, 03 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /about/ I am passionate about using unique datasets to answer interesting questions. More recently, I’ve grown fond of building web apps in R. My background is in Economics and policy analysis, and I have experience conducting original research in criminology, transportation safety, and agriculture. In August 2018, I began working as a data scientist at a large agricultural company where my focus was on machine learning, linear programming, and causal analysis. /2019/11/16/track-your-portfolio-in-r-with-flexdashboard/ Sat, 16 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /2019/11/16/track-your-portfolio-in-r-with-flexdashboard/ Introduction I only discovered flexdashboard after delving semi-deeply into shiny and shinydashboard. For the uninitiated, flexdashboard is an R package that utilizes shiny to create dashboards. (If you have never heard of shiny you can read up on it here) I think what makes flexdashboard different from building a regular shiny app or shinydashboard is that it is easier and faster to work with–at least in my experience. So it is probably a better entry point for building dashboards in R than shinydashboard. /2019/11/10/what-are-priors-in-bayesian-models/ Sun, 10 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /2019/11/10/what-are-priors-in-bayesian-models/ With Bayesian statistics we can incorporate prior information into a model. That means that if we have a priori information about parameters in our model (and we usually do), we can actually use that information! We just need to specify prior probability distributions for our model parameters. For example, we know that a binary variable for whether a field is organic should have a negative impact on yield, so we might want to nudge the coefficient on organic, let’s call it \(\alpha\), in that direction.