If you ever find yourself doing a task a second time you should write a function. Functions are a nice way to quickly and consistently calculate something. They also provide you a nice way of organizing your code. This class will walk through the basics of programming functions and introduce purrr which enhances R’s functional programming (FP) toolkit by providing a complete and consistent set of tools for working with functions and vectors.

As part of an honors thesis I have cadets working on using RCNNs for image detection. The easiest place for them to begin is to learn CNNs. In keras there is the mnist data set. It is a data set of handwritten digits. It is a great data set to use to familiarize yourself with what images look like to a computer and how to build CNNs. This post attempts to provide a first time student information on how to use keras to build CNNs.

I was approached to see if there was a way to web scrape several articles from PubMed. I normally like to use rvest for web scraping, but it would not work because of the java script used to run PubMed. Luckily, RSelenium provides a way to easily interact with websites of this nature. This was my first use of RSelenium, but now I have a lot more efficient ways of using RSelenium and rvest together, although I am sure there are still better ways out there.