The NHSDataDictionaRy package is now back on CRAN, and I am pleased as punch. This update contains the OpenSafely scraper to get data from the website for lookups developed by Ben Goldacre’s team. Why did it disappear? The package disappeared due to me taking it down for major script and function updates. This has now…
The NHS-R community commissioned a package at the start of the year to address the need to pull lookups real time from the NHS Data Dictionary website. I thought this would be a good package, but what I have included, in addition, is the ability to scrape tables and text from any website. What are…
This tutorial explores the various ways data can be encoded, using Pandas and Numpy, to prepare the data ready for a Machine Learning, or predictive model pipeline. Encoding methods There are three main methods explored therein: Label encoding – encoding a value based on where the label order falls – could be good for rank…
I have deployed many models in my time working as a Senior Data Scientist and as a Principal Analyst at Nottingham University Hospitals. I have deployed into SQL, on client sites, in Node.JS and other types of deployment. This was the first time I used the Plumber library, and I loved it. How to deploy…
I had a similar problem recently, and then a request came through from a close friend (Chris Mainey) for the same purpose. I thought “I’ll write a blog post on this”. So, what are the benefits of creating virtual environments.” First of all. what are virtual environments: A virtual environment is a Python environment such that the Python interpreter, libraries and…
The ConfusionTableR package has a new function. Welcome to var_impeR which takes a trained caret R model and produces a tibble and a supporting variable importance plot. How to use the new var_impeR function The code following shows how to use the new function: Training a CARET model The following steps were used on the…
Analysing the pre-conference workshop sentiments I think back to a post I put on the NHS-R community website, but never posted on my own site, as I have been doing some textual analysis recently and referenced this post again. The driver for this package is the tm package and is still one of the main…
This week is an exciting week. Why is this? Well an addition to the NHS-R communities packages has been launched – the NHSDataDictionaRy – now on CRAN. To learn how to use this please look below. I am so excited about the launch of this package and I really think it will help to standardise…
Thanks to the NHS-R community I have had time to work on another package, due to their pledge to get more packages in R funded. A big thanks to Mohammed Amin Mohammed and all the R community team. This package utilises all the excellent lookups provided by NHS Digital and the NHS Data Dictionary and…
I had a recent enquiry on our NHS-R community slack channel about which package is best to work with larger datasets, such as 5 million plus records, with high dimensionality. I got to thinking that the DBI and odbc packages would be best for this purpose, as this is still not considered big data, it…
