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I’ve long wanted to get better at statistics. And largely I have. But I still have a long way to go. I feel like I’m the best at machine learning type stuff, mostly using decision trees. The predictions seem to be the best. But I’m not really in to prediction as much as I am into learning about the relationships that exist in the world. A lot of machine learning is a black box.

I write a lot of R in my life. I’m also a web developer that does most of my writing on this blog in markdown. Up until now these two worlds have been separate. I know and use Rmarkdown at work to write reports but, it always has seemed like a pain to get Rmarkdown to work on this site which is generated using 11ty (Eleventy). Up until now, to get my R work on this site, I have been writing R in another document and manually copying over code and outputs to markdown files. Given how inefficient that process is, I figured it was time to figure out how to write Rmarkdown and render it more seamlessly with this site.

This post includes just the running prediction of if the Dolores River will have a raftable release below McPhee Dam this winter. This is a post with just the results from a much longer post I put up a few days ago. This prediction is an update to the model I made in the previous post. The only thing I updated is I didn't know that you could run XGboost regression as count/Poisson, which looks to be much more accurate (which makes sense).

On my Windows work computer I was having a weird problem where R would break after I restarted my computer. The basics of the problem were: I installed a new version of R, version 4.2.2 to be exact, R would work until I would restart my computer. After that when I started R it would crash I would get an error Fatal Error: Unable to open base package. For weeks I googled around and most of what I could find had to do Rstudio not finding the right version of R. Based on what I found I deleted all of my .Rprofile and .Renviron files that I could find. I deleted all the old versions of R on my machine. Nothing worked. I reinstalled R version 4.2.2 like 5 times. Still the same problem. I even installed R on an external hard drive because I thought that my work proxy was doing something weird.

I started to use the {targets} package for some of my larger projects. It was a little challenging for me to wrap my head around but after working through some initial problems I think it will help me stay organized and write code in a more composable way. Below are a few notes that I needed to keep coming back to when I was getting started. If you need a comprehensive {targets} getting started I suggest the targets book linked above or in the References section below.

Will there be a raftable release below McPhee Dam this year? I hope so. In this post I'll use the {tidymodels} R package to predict the number of raftable release days with Xgboost. This post is an update to an earlier post. I take a slightly different approach to build this model and I think the model is more accurate than the last model I built.