I’ve written before about importing tabular text files into R, and here comes some more. This is because I believe (firmly) that importing data is the major challenge for beginners who want to analyse their data in R. What is the most important thing about using any statistics software? To get your data into it 
How safe is Mexico? That is a frequent question people ask me. There is even website about it (see this blog post). So I’ve decided it was time to go...
by Joseph Rickert In addition to the considerable benefit of being able to meet other, like-minded R users face-to-face, R user groups fill a niche in the world of...
Dear R users, I am happy to officially announce a new website called R-users.com. The idea of the site is that community members will invite other R users to...
Within 2 weeks on Thursday, March 20, The RBelgium R user group is holding its next Regular meeting in Brussels for which this is the schedule:** Analysis and visualisation...
I have developed the “installr” package in order to help people who use Windows to easily update R on their machine. The package: 1) Tests if a newer version...
![Advances in scalable Bayesian computation [day #3]](http://xianblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/dscn2538.jpg?w=450&h=253)
We have now gone over the midpoint of our workshop Advances in Scalable Bayesian Computation with three talks in the morning and an open research or open air afternoon....
Datasets come sometimes with predictors that take an unique value across samples. Such uninformative predictor is more common than you might think. This kind of predictor is not only...
I teach some introductory stats classes with SPSS, and one of the frustrations for me is that you have to pay an extra wad of cash to do any...
And here is the second day of our workshop Advances in Scalable Bayesian Computation gone! This time, it sounded like the “main” theme was about brains… In fact, Simon...
The latest slides from web scraping through R: Web scraping for the humanities and social sciencesSlides from the first session hereSlides from the second session hereThis week we look...
This is another situation where Fourier terms are useful for handling the seasonality. Not only is the seasonal period rather long, it is non-integer (averaging 365.25/7 = 52.18). So...
The release date for Zumel, Mount “Practical Data Science with R” is getting close. I thought I would share a few statistics about what goes into this kind of...
Aspinalls Group ——————- Aspinalls is a specialist financial planning practice committed to providing highly personalised service to private clients and their families. Our technical expertise, allied to more than...
Two items of post from utility companies that recently dropped through our door included little graphics. There was a degree of innovation in them both. The first, from British Gas,...
by Rodney Sparapani, PhD Rodney is an Assistant Professor in the Institute for Health and Society from the Division of Biostatistics at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee...
The Star Puzzle is a puzzle presented on The Math Forum. I became aware of this problem by noticing the article and solution posted on Quantitative Decisions article section....
This was the first day of our workshop Advances in Scalable Bayesian Computation and it sounded like the “main” theme was probabilistic programming, in tune with my book review...
First of all, I’d like to thank my readers for the lots of feedback on my last post on beautiful outputs in R. I tried to consider all suggestions,...
Last week's Cologne R user group meeting was all about R and databases. We had three talks from a generic overview on how to connect R to databases, to...
Following my post on fitting models to long time series, I thought I’d tackle the opposite problem, which is more common in business environments. I often get asked how few data...
Since we've had quite a few announcements over the last month or so, I thought I'd take a moment to catch up on some of the media reports mentioning...
While preparing the practicals for our course at the University of Alberta, I've discovered something kind of interesting. I'm sure this is nothing new and actually people who normally...
Here's comes a script I wrote for creating contour lines in KML-format to be used with Google Earth https://github.com/gimoya/theBioBucket-Archives/blob/master/R/r_contours_for_google_earth.RIf you want to check or just use the datasets I...
Apparently, this turned out to be my most popular post ever. Of course there are lots of things to say about the heatmap (or quilt, tile, guilt plot etc),...
The EARL (Effective Applications of the R Language) Conference takes place in London on the 16th and 17th September 2014. It will provide an opportunity for those using and...
A new ggplot2-based implementation of control charts for the #RStats package qcc, and some lessons learned along the way.
Do not believe anything: what artists really do is to hang around all day (Paco de Lucia) Andy Warhol was mathematician. At least, he knew how clustering algorithms work....
Quandl is a “wikipedia” for numerical data that allows you to search rapidly through 8 million ready-to-use data sets. At DataCamp we created a free in-browser coding tutorial on how...
Plotly: collaborative, publication-quality graphing. 
