Alright, this is it: I am officially back! :-D I have not written any blogposts for over a year. Last year, I had the cutest baby boy and ever since then, I did not get around to doing much coding. One of the reasons was that, unfortunately, we did not have the easiest of starts with the little one. Feeding problems led to weight gain problems, so we had to weigh him regularly.

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Since I migrated my blog from Github Pages to blogdown and Netlify, I wanted to start migrating (most of) my old posts too - and use that opportunity to update them and make sure the code still works. Here I am updating my very first machine learning post from 27 Nov 2016: Can we predict flu deaths with Machine Learning and R?. Changes are marked as bold comments. The main changes I made are:

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Working in Data Science, I often feel like I have to justify using R over Python. And while I do use Python for running scripts in production, I am much more comfortable with the R environment. Basically, whenever I can, I use R for prototyping, testing, visualizing and teaching. But because personal gut-feeling preference isn’t a very good reason to give to (scientifically minded) people, I’ve thought a lot about the pros and cons of using R.

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