R-core member Peter Dalgaard announced yesterday that R 3.0.3 is now available. This is the final update to the R 3.0 series, and includes several small but handy new features and minor bug fixes. Improvements include support for writing very large tables to disk, better handling of foreign-language calendar dates, and more accuracy when calculating extreme quantiles of the...
Hyperthreading FTW? Testing parallelization performance in R.
Alright, let's test some parallelization functionalities in R.The machine:MacBook Air (mid-2013) with 8 GB of RAM and the i7 CPU (Intel i7 Haswell 4650U). This CPU is hyper-threaded, meaning (at...
RUG-Philippines Meetup: Markov Switching Models in R
To the R users based in the Philippines, there will be upcoming meetup, here are the details:topics: Markov Switching Models in R by Ohly Santos ...
Advances in scalable Bayesian computation [day #4]
![Advances in scalable Bayesian computation [day #4]](http://xianblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/dscn2538.jpg?w=450&h=253)
Final day of our workshop Advances in Scalable Bayesian Computation already, since tomorrow morning is an open research time ½ day! Another “perfect day in paradise”, with the Banff Centre...
Analytics Software Popularity Update: Counting Blogs, Simplifying Job Searches
My latest update to The Popularity of Data Analysis Software is an attempt to use blog counts to estimate the popularity of analytics software. While I was able to...
Using R: common errors in table import
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...
Poverty and Crime in Mexico – Interactive Map
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...
Getting Started with Hidden Markov Models in R
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...
R-users.com: invite fellow R-users to Jobs, conferences, and R-projects
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...
Air quality, weather analysis & latent feature modelling @RBelgium
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...
Extending the {installr} package to help update R for mac and linux R users
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]
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....
Near-zero variance predictors. Should we remove them?
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...
A simple R bootstrap function for beginners
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...
Advances in scalable Bayesian computation [day #2]
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...
Web Scraping: Scaling up Digital Data Collection
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...
Forecasting weekly data
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...
Some statistics about the book
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...
Intern/Researcher
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...
Visualizations on the Monopoly board
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,...
Emacs, ESS and R for Zombies
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
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....
Advances in scalable Bayesian computation [day #1]
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...
Beautiful table outputs in R, part 2 #rstats #sjPlot
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,...
Review: Kölner R Meeting 26 Feburary 2014
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...
Fitting models to short time series
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...
Revolution Analytics in the News: Visionary in the Wired Cloud
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...
Issue with thinning in R2OpenBUGS vs R2jags
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...
Use Case: Make Contour Lines for Google Earth with Spatial R
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...
Plotly: collaborative, publication-quality graphing. 
