Bastian Greshake Tzovaras

> [@brant](https://twitter.com/brant) they\'re good dogs Brent
>
> --- WeRateDogs™ (@dog_rates) [September 12,
> 2016](https://twitter.com/dog_rates/status/775410014383026176)

Being more of a dog-person (or to stay in *OkCupid* lingo *likes dogs,
has cats*) I was sad when I saw that the
*[CatterPlots](https://github.com/Gibbsdavidl/CatterPlots)* made their
rounds on Twitter again this week, as there's still no dog-centric
alternative if you're an *R*-faring data visualizer. In order to dry my
tears I went over to [dog_rates](https://twitter.com/dog_rates) for some
binge dog-watching. And then I wondered, aren't these puppers all
getting cuter and cuter? Luckily this is easy to check, thanks to the
excellent, objective, and above all numeric ratings applied by
*dog_rates*. So h\*ck, why not give it a try?

As there are only little over 3500 tweets for *dog_rates*, one can
nearly scrape all the ratings done out since the beginning in late 2015
through Twitter's API. Then one just needs to filter out the retweets
(as we don't want to count any doggo twice) and now we can look at all
valid ratings, with a valid rating being everything that's some numeric
value that's followed by */10*. And that's it, you're good to go to
analyze how cute those puppers are! Doing this one ends up with around
1,500 rated dogs, posted between 2015-12-03 and 2017-02-16.

![scatterplot uncleaned](/assets/images/doggo-atticus.png)

And the first naive scatterplot shows us only one clear thing: Atticus
is a very good (and extremely patriotic) dog. But if we, just for the
sake of data resolution, exclude him for a tiny second we can see that
there's a clear trend towards cuter dogs with basically all puppers
taking at least 11/10 these days. That totally smells like [the canine
Flynn effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect) to me!

![scatterplot cleaned](/assets/images/doggo-scatterplot.png)

The dogsplot shows that trend even better. I'll leave it up to you to
calculate in which year we can't rate dogs any longer as Twitter will
not have enough characters to fit the complete rating. At least we'll
have something to look forward to during these times.

![dogsplot cleaned](/assets/images/doggo-barkplot.png)

But having 1,500 rated dogs gives you the opportunity for something
else, as all of these dogs not only come with their rating, but also
with a picture of themselves. And most of them you can even easily
download through the *Twitter* API as well. If you're now thinking
*Barkificial Intelligence*, then you're totally right! So I went and
downloaded the images for \~1,200 of those dogs and labelled them with
their respective rating. As the distribution of the dogs is so skewed I
limited myself to the six categories \<9/10 and 9-13/13. From there on
it was just following the *[Tensorflow for
Dog-Lovers](https://codelabs.developers.google.com/codelabs/tensorflow-for-poets/)*
tutorial. But looking at the test accuracy tells us that, despite all
the grand claims for *Deep Learning*, it's just not ready yet to
accurately rate dogs: `Final test accuracy = 34.4%`{.language-plaintext
.highlighter-rouge}. So, rest assured dog raters all over the world,
robots are not yet coming to take your jobs.

The [code for scraping the tweets, doing the plots and downloading the
images is on GitHub](https://github.com/gedankenstuecke/good_puppeRs).
Good luck in getting better dog classifications.

Being more of a dog-person (or to stay in

 OkCupid

lingo

 likes dogs, has cats

) I was sad when I saw that the

 CatterPlots

made their rounds on Twitter again this week, as there’s still no dog-centric alternative if you’re an

 R

-faring data visualizer. In order to dry my tears I went over to dog_rates for some binge dog-watching. And then I wondered, aren’t these puppers all getting cuter and cuter?

Messages de Rogue Scholar

They are Good Dogs, Indeed