I’d like to work an example of using SQL WITH Common Table Expressions to produce more legible SQL. A major complaint with SQL is that it composes statements by right-ward nesting. That is: a sequence of operations A -__ B -__ C is represented as SELECT C FROM SELECT […] [...Read more...]

I’ve been tinkering a lot recently with the data_algebra, and just released version 0.7.0 to PyPi. In this note I’ll touch on what the data algebra is, what the new features are, and my plans going forward.     The data algebra The data algebra is a modern realization of […] [...Read more...]

We have a new improved version of the “how to design a cdata/data_algebra data transform” up! The original article, the Python example, and the R example have all been updated to use the new video. Please check it out! [...Read more...]

Nina Zumel and I have a two new tutorials on fluid data wrangling/shaping. They are written in a parallel structure, with the R version of the tutorial being almost identical to the Python version of the tutorial. This reflects our opinion on the “which is better for data science ... [...Read more...]

We’ve been experimenting with this for a while, and the next R vtreat package will have a back-port of the Python vtreat package sklearn pipe step interface (in addition to the standard R interface). This means the user can express easily express modeling intent by choosing between coder$fit_... [...Read more...]

For quite a while we have been teaching estimating variable re-encodings on the exact same data they are later naively using to train a model on, leads to an undesirable nested model bias. The vtreat package (both the R version and Python version) both incorporate a cross-frame method that allows ... [...Read more...]

I’d like to share some new timings on a grouped in-place aggregation task. A client of mine was seeing some slow performance, so I decided to time a very simple abstraction of one of the steps of their workflow. Roughly, the task was to add in some derived per-group ... [...Read more...]

I’ve been writing a lot about a category theory interpretations of data-processing pipelines and some of the improvements we feel it is driving in both the data_algebra and in rquery/rqdatatable. I think I’ve found an even better category theory re-formulation of the package, which I will ... [...Read more...]

In our recent note What is new for rquery December 2019 we mentioned an ugly processing pipeline that translates into SQL of varying size/quality depending on the query generator we use. In this note we try a near-relative of that query in the data_algebra. dplyr translates the query to ... [...Read more...]

Introduction I would like to talk about some of the design principles underlying the data_algebra package (and also in its sibling rquery package). The data_algebra package is a query generator that can act on either Pandas data frames or on SQL tables. This is discussed on the project ... [...Read more...]