https://blog.albertkuo.me/ Recent content on Albert's Blog Hugo -- gohugo.io en Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2025-01-05-review-of-a-tale-for-the-time-being/ Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2025-01-05-review-of-a-tale-for-the-time-being/ I recently read A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. The story is told through two narrators, Nao, a teenager living in Japan, and Ruth, a Japanese writer living on a remote island off the coast of Canada with her husband, Oliver. Ruth finds a diary written by Nao, through which we learn about Nao’s story alongside Ruth and Oliver. (Spoilers to follow!) Throughout the book, I found Nao’s story to be the much more compelling one. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2024-12-24-impact-of-ai-on-work/ Tue, 24 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2024-12-24-impact-of-ai-on-work/ Two years ago, ChatGPT burst onto the scene. Since then, there has been a lot of hype about ChatGPT and generative AI more broadly, as well as discussions surrounding how this technology will change work as we know it. One of the more surprising takes I’ve seen floating around is the idea that AI1 will allow workers to work less by virtue of increasing productivity. I think it’s pretty unlikely that this is going to come to pass. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2024-01-26-treating-data-with-caution/ Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2024-01-26-treating-data-with-caution/ I recently came across some interesting stories about data that I thought were good examples of how data can be misleading. The first story is this thread on X (Twitter), in which Ben Schmidt critiques a recent tweet/Financial Times article from John Burn-Murdoch.1 John cites and extends analysis from an economics paper that argues that books have begun talking less about “progress and future” and more about “caution, worry, and risk” over the last 60 years based on data from the Google Ngram project. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2024-01-03-my-favorite-books-part-2/ Wed, 03 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2024-01-03-my-favorite-books-part-2/ Happy new year! Today, I thought I’d share a list of books I’ve enjoyed reading in recent years. I last posted about my favorite books in 2019 and I’ve read more books since then, so here are some more of my recommendations. I hope you find something you also enjoy reading from the list. Fiction The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller - A retelling of Homer’s Iliad, it’s a captivating love story set in Greek mythology. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2023-12-28-organizing-your-notes-on-obsidian/ Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2023-12-28-organizing-your-notes-on-obsidian/ I use a note-taking app at work called Obsidian, but only recently did I get around to learning how to use more of its functionality. For the uninitiated, Obsidian is a note-taking app that uses markdown, which is a markup language that’s simple to learn and readable.1 The advantage of a markup language is that it makes your formatting explicit in what you write. If you’ve ever struggled with manually adjusting unexpected indentations, spacings, etc. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2023-12-15-collaborations-between-academia-and-industry/ Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2023-12-15-collaborations-between-academia-and-industry/ Since graduating from my PhD program in 2022, I’ve been working in the tech industry as a data scientist. This transition has given me more perspective on how the research community is spread across academia and industry. One interesting thing I’ve learned is that the boundaries are blurrier than I had previously thought. It’s true that when I was a PhD student in the biostatistics department at JHU, I was already aware that there were professors who had collaborations outside academia. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2023-02-27-debugging-your-analysis-as-a-data-scientist/ Sat, 04 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2023-02-27-debugging-your-analysis-as-a-data-scientist/ Recently, I’ve been working on revisions for a paper1 from my PhD and it reminded me of a valuable lesson I learned while working on some tricky statistical analysis for that project. The idea is what I think of as “debugging” your analysis.2 Debugging in a programming context refers to the process of identifying and fixing bugs (errors in your code). But a similar concept of “debugging” also applies to data science. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-12-03-career-paths-for-phd-students-in-biostatistics/ Sat, 03 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-12-03-career-paths-for-phd-students-in-biostatistics/ As a biostatistics PhD alumnus who just graduated earlier this year, I thought I would share some of the things I learned regarding potential career paths. If you are a current PhD student, I would encourage you to seriously think about your future career plans in your third or fourth year, with some level of detail beyond “I want to stay in academia” or “I want to go into industry. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-10-01-misconceptions-about-getting-a-phd-in-biostatistics/ Sat, 01 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-10-01-misconceptions-about-getting-a-phd-in-biostatistics/ This post is sort of a reflection on my PhD experience, condensed as responses to some major misconceptions I had about a PhD (or misconceptions I’ve heard other people express). I hope you find it to be a useful, or at least interesting, read. Misconception #1: If you enjoy your field and want to study it at a deeper level, you should get a PhD. It’s not exactly that this isn’t true, but I think it’s not an accurate representation of the purpose of your PhD program. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-06-10-some-thoughts-on-reading-advice-online/ Sat, 11 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-06-10-some-thoughts-on-reading-advice-online/ As I’ve been brainstorming more “advice” posts for this blog, I thought it might be useful for me to write down some thoughts I have about how to read advice. I try to acknowledge on this blog that my perspective is only a subjective, individual one based on my experiences, but I thought I would elaborate a bit more on why that’s important for you to remember as the reader. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-04-02-plotting-your-fitbit-data-in-r/ Sat, 02 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-04-02-plotting-your-fitbit-data-in-r/ I use a Fitbit to track some basic health statistics, but sometimes I wished that the plots on the app were displayed slightly differently. In this post, I will give a go at making plots that I think would be useful for me. To do this, I first need to download my data from Fitbit. One way is to export your data manually from Fitbit’s website. Alternatively, they also have an API. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-03-06-my-thesis-defense/ Sat, 12 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-03-06-my-thesis-defense/ Last week, I successfully defended my thesis! Just like I did with my preliminary oral exam, I will write about my experience here and give some insight into what happens behind-the-scenes. For those who may be unfamiliar, the thesis defense is the third and last major milestone in our PhD program. The first is the written comprehensive exam (taken after your first or second year), the second is the preliminary oral exam (typically taken in your third year), and the third is the thesis defense (typically taken in your fifth year). https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-02-19-animating-the-jolla-theme-from-the-postcards-r-package/ Sat, 19 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-02-19-animating-the-jolla-theme-from-the-postcards-r-package/ Recently, I came across this great tutorial by Connor Rothschild, where he teaches you how to animate the Hugo Academic theme for a blogdown website. Inspired by this post, I wanted to apply similar animations to my personal website, which was built using the postcards R package.1 Below is what the resulting animated theme looked like: If you don’t care about how I implemented this and just want to apply an animated version of the jolla theme (screenshot above), you can install a forked copy of the postcards R package from my repo using the R command remotes::install_github(" https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-02-05-day-in-the-life-of-a-biostatistics-phd-student/ Sat, 05 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-02-05-day-in-the-life-of-a-biostatistics-phd-student/ Today, I thought I would share what a day in the life of a PhD student is like. Personally, I’ve always been interested in other people’s day-to-day experience at work. So I imagine that similarly, getting a glimpse into my day could be interesting and informative, particularly for students thinking about getting a PhD in biostatistics. I took two days from my third-year calendar (i.e. pre-pandemic) to give a sense of not only the typical activities I do, but also show how each day can be drastically different. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-01-21-how-good-is-fivethirtyeight-s-nba-prediction-model/ Fri, 21 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-01-21-how-good-is-fivethirtyeight-s-nba-prediction-model/ As someone who watches basketball and enjoys sports analytics (see my previous post on estimating win probabilities live during an NBA game), I’ve been a fan of FiveThirtyEight’s NBA prediction models, which are always fun to follow and interesting to read about. Calibration vs Accuracy Recently, I came across an article by FiveThirtyEight in which they self-evaluated their prediction models. The primary metric1 they use to evaluate their model is calibration, that is, whether their forecasted probabilities match up with the actual probabilities. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-01-15-tips-for-a-first-time-teaching-assistant/ Mon, 17 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-01-15-tips-for-a-first-time-teaching-assistant/ For the last 3 years, I’ve been teaching the lab sections as a teaching assistant for the statistics sequence at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The course is geared towards master’s level students in public health, though some PhD students and doctors/members of the JHU Medicine community also take it. As you can imagine, there can be a range of familiarity in the classroom with regard to what students know about stats, math, and coding. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-01-04-reordering-geom-col-and-geom-bar-by-count-or-value/ Thu, 06 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-01-04-reordering-geom-col-and-geom-bar-by-count-or-value/ One of the things I’m always looking up with ggplot2 is how to reorder the bars in my bar charts by their length (i.e. the count/frequency or value, depending on whether you’re using geom_bar or geom_col). If you do a Google search, there are multiple different solutions, but I will document in this post what I’ve found to be the cleanest and simplest solution.1 Reordering geom_bar by count By default, the bars are arranged by the order (levels) of the factor variable. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-01-03-analyzing-metadata-from-spotify-playlists/ Mon, 03 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2022-01-03-analyzing-metadata-from-spotify-playlists/ I recently came across this post about a Python module GSA that allows you to download metadata from Spotify playlists.1 This was great, because it was a perfect opportunity for me to test RStudio 1.4’s improved support for Python, which I had been excited to try out since I saw the news. Download Metadata The original blog post lays out the steps you need to install everything properly, so I won’t repeat them here. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2021-05-30-applying-to-internships/ Mon, 31 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/2021-05-30-applying-to-internships/ When I was applying to internships last fall, there was a lot I didn’t know about the process. So I thought I would go over my experience in this post, in hopes that I can demystify the process a little for future students. Before I begin, some context on my background: I am a 4th year biostatistics PhD student doing research in cancer and statistical genomics. I mostly applied to data scientist internships in tech/biotech companies and statistics/biostatistics internships in pharmaceutical companies, and this summer, I will be doing an internship in data science at Amazon. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/data-leakage/ Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/data-leakage/ In my research, something I do fairly often is to build prediction models – given a set of variables (e.g. patient characteristics), we want to predict an outcome of interest (e.g. disease status). Typically, to prevent overfitting, we do cross-validation, so we have a separate training and test set, we train the model on the training set, and evaluate the performance of the model on the test set. This sounds like a simple practice to follow in theory, but as the scope of your data processing and feature selection steps increases, it becomes easy to accidentally violate the separation between the training and the test set and you may wind up borrowing information from the test set to train your model. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/introduction-to-sql/ Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/introduction-to-sql/ Although SQL is commonly used in industry, it’s not something that’s often used or taught in academia. I learned it on my own a few years ago, but since I don’t use it regularly, it’s hard to retain. To resolve this, I’ve created the following guide for basic SQL commands along with their equivalents in R/dplyr. Hopefully, this will allow me to pick it back up again more quickly in the future. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/probability-of-winning-an-nba-game-a-minute-by-minute-breakdown/ Fri, 20 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/probability-of-winning-an-nba-game-a-minute-by-minute-breakdown/ Your NBA team is down 17 points and there are only 8 minutes left in the game. What is the probability that they pull a comeback and win the game? It’s possible to answer this using historical data (i.e. in the past, how many teams have won after being in this situation). Given that sports commentators love to provide super specific, seemingly arbitrary statistics (e.g. no team has won Game 7 of an ECF after losing Game 6 by more than 10 points), I knew that I should be able to access the relevant data somewhere and calculate these probabilities. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/advice-for-prospective-phd-students-in-biostatistics/ Fri, 30 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/advice-for-prospective-phd-students-in-biostatistics/ It’s application season for graduate admissions again! As a current PhD student, I thought I would share some advice for prospective students. I’d previously written on whether you should get a PhD. In this post, I will talk about things you can do to prepare for a biostatistics PhD and the application process. As with any advice I give on this blog, it is based on my personal experience – I was a math and statistics major in undergrad at UChicago and I’m now a biostatistics PhD student at Johns Hopkins – so your mileage may vary. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/effect-of-increasing-voter-turnout-in-the-u-s/ Fri, 28 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/effect-of-increasing-voter-turnout-in-the-u-s/ On campaign trails across the U.S., the same message is often repeated: vote! Their goal is to encourage more people to vote, especially the people who are likely to vote for them. But which party benefits more from increasing overall voter turnout? The conventional wisdom today is that it benefits the Democratic party more than the Republican party. This is based on the working knowledge that young people of color are believed to have lower voting turnouts and are also more likely to vote for Democratic candidates. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/learning-to-use-vim/ Sun, 17 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/learning-to-use-vim/ Even though vim has been my default text editor for a couple of years now, I’m still woefully ignorant about how to actually use it. Because 95% of my coding time is spent in RStudio, I really only use vim to briefly edit some bash scripts and therefore my unfamiliarity with it isn’t an urgent issue. Nonetheless, I tried to rectify this shortcoming a few months ago by changing my RStudio settings to “vim mode” and forcing myself to use vim commands all the time. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/my-preliminary-oral-exam/ Sun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/my-preliminary-oral-exam/ In my PhD program, we are required to take a “preliminary oral exam.” It’s the second major hurdle to getting your PhD, the first being the written comprehensive exam and the last being the thesis defense, and it typically takes place during your third year. The structure of the oral exam is the following. First, I was asked to leave the room for a few minutes as the committee members decide what order they’re going to ask questions and other logistics. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/introduction-to-regular-expressions-regex-in-r/ Wed, 08 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/introduction-to-regular-expressions-regex-in-r/ If you haven’t used regular expressions (regex) before, they are basically a way to write search patterns for strings. I’ve always found them to be inscrutable and unintuitive, so even though the search pattern I have in mind is usually very simple and should, in theory, require only a basic regex, I always have to Google what the correct syntax is. Today, I’m going to try to solve this problem by writing my own guide to regex. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/creating-an-r-package-for-the-first-time/ Sat, 14 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/creating-an-r-package-for-the-first-time/ There are already a lot of great resources1 that teach you how to make an R package. But I thought it would still be worthwhile to walk through how I created my first one – at the very least, it’ll be helpful for myself when I write my next R package. Here is my step-by-step guide to building a (minimally functional) R package. Step 1: Set up your packages and directory To create your own R package, you will need to use two packages, devtools and roxygen2. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/getting-started-with-r-markdown/ Tue, 22 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/getting-started-with-r-markdown/ I often use R Markdown for my research projects or any kind of data analysis (if you’re familiar with Python, they are similar to Jupyter notebooks). There are many advantages to using R Markdown over writing R scripts. One of the major ones is the ease with which it allows me to turn my work into something presentable for my advisor or other collaborators. By using R Markdown, I don’t have to track down a bunch of plots and files or really do any additional work to organize them. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/my-first-jsm/ Sun, 04 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/my-first-jsm/ Last week, I attended JSM (Joint Statistical Meetings) in Denver. It was my first conference ever, so I made sure to record down my thoughts. Since I wasn’t presenting at this conference, I had the luxury of being able to attend sessions without feeling anxious. And that was really great because I think getting to see what conferences are like before I present at one makes it less intimidating. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/5-r-packages-to-simplify-your-data-science-workflow/ Fri, 28 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/5-r-packages-to-simplify-your-data-science-workflow/ I just finished my second year in the PhD program, which means 2 years of writing a lot of R code. Today, I wanted to share some useful (and perhaps lesser known) R packages that I use. pacman for loading packages This package contains an awesome function called p_load. I prefer the concise way it lets you load packages, as opposed to writing library(package) over and over again. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/tips-and-tricks-for-statistical-proofs/ Tue, 21 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/tips-and-tricks-for-statistical-proofs/ I’ve been taking probability theory this year and I noticed that a lot of proofs will assume that the reader already knows some commonly used “tricks.” If you aren’t familiar with them, it can be hard to follow the proofs in the textbook,1 let alone prove it yourself. I felt like this was happening to me a lot, so in an effort to better familiarize myself, I’ve written down some useful tips and tricks, along with explanations and/or examples. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/should-you-get-a-phd-in-biostatistics/ Thu, 25 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/should-you-get-a-phd-in-biostatistics/ Throughout the process of applying to graduate school, I felt unsure about whether getting a PhD was a good idea. I remember Googling “should I get a PhD” just to see what I could find out of curiosity. Chances are, if you’re reading this post, you’re in a similar boat. As a now second-year PhD student in biostatistics, I think I have a better idea of whether being in a PhD program has been a good choice for me and I’ll share what I think would’ve been useful for me to know back when I was applying. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/my-favorite-books-to-date/ Fri, 29 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/my-favorite-books-to-date/ I sometimes get requests for book recommendations, so I decided to write a post on my favorite books.1 For each book, I give a very short description (< 3 sentences) of the book and why I enjoyed it. Hopefully, that’ll give you some idea of whether you want to read it too. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari - Harari tells a captivating story about how humans became the dominant species on the planet, with sweeping and intuitive explanations on a wide range of topics. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/point-shape-options-in-ggplot/ Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/point-shape-options-in-ggplot/ I’m familiar enough with ggplot that I can make a quick plot pretty easily in most cases.1 But when it comes to fine-tuning the various plot aesthetics, like adjusting the legend position or rotating axis tick labels, I always have to look them up. Today, I will be writing about one of these pesky things: looking up the point shape options for geom_point. The available documentation for this isn’t great, so I thought it would be worthwhile to write my own reference. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/submitting-parallel-jobs-on-a-cluster/ Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/submitting-parallel-jobs-on-a-cluster/ Recently, I’ve been running simulations on our school’s computing cluster (JHPCE), which schedules jobs using the Open Grid Engine. Each simulation takes about half a day to complete, so I could run them sequentially and wait a week to get 14 simulation points. Or I could run them in parallel and get 14 simulation points in less than a day! In theory, running my simulations in parallel should be a very straightforward task. https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/setting-up-my-blog-why-i-chose-hugo-over-jekyll/ Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/post/setting-up-my-blog-why-i-chose-hugo-over-jekyll/ I’ve been reading a lot of people’s blogs in the statistics/data science world lately and it made me start thinking about things that I wanted to write about and share. So here we are – my first post! Hello world! Before I could write anything, I had to decide on how I was going to build and host the blog. For my personal website, I already use Jekyll, so it seemed natural to build my blog as part of my website. https://blog.albertkuo.me/about/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/about/ About Background Hi! I’m Albert. I started this blog in 2019, inspired by all the blogs I follow, and I try to write useful and interesting things for the community. If you’re new here, I recommend checking out my start here page to see what kind of topics I write about. I’ve also spent (i.e. wasted) many hours tinkering with the blog theme and convincing myself that it makes a difference. https://blog.albertkuo.me/new/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/new/ New? Start Here 👋 Hi there and welcome! On this blog, I write broadly about things that I think would be of interest to my field and/or my peers. Below is a sampling of some of my frequent topics. If you’re interested in advice related to the PhD program, see the following posts: Should You Get a PhD? Applying to Internships as a PhD Student and check out the tags #prospective-phd and #phd I also like to write tutorials and guides on things I’m learning, such as: https://blog.albertkuo.me/recs/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/recs/ Recs & Resources The original inspiration behind this page was to put together a list of blogs I follow. I’ve always felt like I discovered new blogs by chance, so I figured a compiled blogroll would be useful to others looking for new and similar-ish blogs to follow. Then I decided that I should just have a page for all my recommendations in one place. Feel free to use the mini table of contents below to navigate to different sections. https://blog.albertkuo.me/subscribe/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.albertkuo.me/subscribe/ Subscribe Subscribe to receive new posts in your inbox! I will not send you any spam and you can unsubscribe anytime. #mc_embed_signup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own Mailchimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */ * indicates required Email Address *