I'm a PhD candidate in the University of Wisconsin-Madison statistics program. My github is a mixture of research code, #rstats ✨ contributions, and personal data analysis projects. I write long-form explainers on my blog, https://www.alexpghayes.com/.

• fastadi performs self-tuning matrix completion via adaptive thresholding, often outperforming softImpute. See the paper for algorithmic and theoretical details. I have also extended this algorithm to work with matrices where the entire upper triangle is observed as part of some work on citation networks.

• aPPR helps you calculate approximate personalized pageranks from large graphs, including those that can only be queried via an API. aPPR additionally performs degree correction and regularization, allowing users to recover blocks from stochastic blockmodels. Read the paper.

• vsp performs semi-parametric estimation of latent factors in random-dot product graphs by computing varimax rotations of the spectral embeddings of graphs. The resulting factors are sparse and interpretable. Read the paper.

• fastRG samples random-dot product graphs much faster than naive sampling procedures and is especially useful when running simulation studies. See the paper for a description of the fastRG core algorithm.

I am involved in a number of open source projects in the tidyverse and tidymodels orbits. I previously maintained the broom package, which currently has ~6 million downloads, and for my contributions am an author on the tidyverse paper. I intermittently participate in the Stan and ROpenSci communities as well.

• classic stats formulas

• distributions3

• you'd like to hire me for a research or data science for social good internship,
• you want to discuss design of statistical modeling software,
• you want to collaborate on a research project, or
• you want to write an explainer together.

Outside of R, I'm a proficient Python user, and can pull together enough SQL, C++, and Julia to get things done.

I am responsive via email.

Last updated 2023-10-20.