Learn to use and visualize K-Means Cluster Analysis in R with the 2020 Economic Freedom Index Data from The Heritage Foundation — Objectives Use K-Means Clustering Algorithm in R Determine the right amount of clusters Create tables and visualizations of the clusters Download, extract, and load complex Excel files from the web into R Clean, wrangle, and filter the data efficiently Introduction K-Means clustering is an unsupervised machine learning technique that is quite useful…

Using ARIMA models and the Case-Shiller Index with some creative R programming lets us predict national housing prices for the next year. How can that be?! Let’s find out! — Objectives Predict the next year of US housing prices Get experience with using real economic data Visualize the data Understand underlying assumptions about the data Learn about predictive modeling using the ARIMA method Introduction

Let me share the glory of the full_join() function with you using the R language! Have you ever been working with multiple tables of data in R and had trouble merging them into a single table? Did you go to Google to tell you to “just use rbind” or see…

A plain English way to understand routers in 2022. Like many of you, one of the devices that I use every day is the best router I could find in 2022 for my house. However, I have noticed that there is quite a bit of confusion, misunderstanding, or gaps in…

It is wasting time and resources for you and your business. It really seems like everyone in the IT field is trying to up-skill by getting new certifications, and a lot of people are trying to get a certification to break into IT as a career field. Great. Awesome. I’m…

Any freshman level macroeconomics student could have told you this would happen with one graph, so why does it seem like everyone is so surprised all of the sudden? Long Run, Short Run, What Run? Remember what it was like to hope for the first stimulus payments? Well, I distinctly remember the day when I was…

Real minimum wage has actually never been that high in US history. TL;DR — yes. Long answer — probably. Here’s why. Why Bother? So, I read your comments on my Good Luck With That $15 Minimum Wage, Grocery Workers article and got quite a diverse set of responses ranging in sentiment from…

AI-powered shopping carts are here to take your jobs because of basic economics. — Robots Are Taking Their Jobs! Today I stumbled on an article about how AI-powered shopping carts are coming to Kroger grocery stores [1]. The message here is crystal clear. If your job involves standing around doing something that can be readily done by a machine, $15 an hour minimum wage is not going to save…

Use real European economic data to learn about data wrangling, cleaning, and efficient plotting using an Excel file. — Objectives Download, extract, and load complex Excel files from the web into R Clean, wrangle, and filter the data efficiently Use custom functions to simplify our plotting Learn to use the stack(), grep(), substr(), unique(), ggplot(), stat_smooth(), and facet_wrap() functions in R