IST/5, the British Standards’ committee responsible for programming languages in the UK, has a new(ish) committee secretary and like all people in a new role wants to see a vision of the future; IST/5 members have been emailed asking us what we see happening in the programming language standards’ world over the next 12 months.
Agent Based Models and RNetLogo
by Joseph Rickert If I had to pick just one application to be the “killer app” for the digital computer I would probably choose Agent Based Modeling (ABM). Imagine...
Six of One (Plot), Half-Dozen of the Other
This is a guest post by Randy Zwitch (@randyzwitch), a digital analytics and predictive modeling consultant in the Greater Philadelphia area. Randy blogs regularly about Data Science and related technologies...
What shall we talk about at ESA?
ESA is just around the corner, and many of us are gearing up and trying to figure out a schedule to cover all the talks...
Left-handed catchers
Benny Distefano – 1985 Donruss #166 (source: baseball-almanac.com) We are approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of the last time a left-handed throwing catcher appeared behind the...
Coherent population forecasting using R
This is an example of how to use the demography package in R for stochastic population forecasting with coherent components. It is based on the papers by Hyndman and...
magrittr: Simplifying R code with pipes
R is a functional language, which means that your code often contains a lot of ( parentheses ). And complex code often means nesting those parentheses together, which make...
Mideast Graph 3: Slate Middle East Friendship
Slate recently published a great info-graphic about Middle-East Relationships. It shows the relationships (Friend, Enemy, or Complicated) of 13 countries / organizations and the relationships between each pair. One...
Making random draws from an arbitrarily defined pdf
I recently found myself in need of a function to sample randomly from an arbitrarily defined probability density function. An excellent post by Quantitations shows how to accomplish this...
Flood fill a region of an active device in R
The following is a function to "flood fill" a region on the active plotting device. Once called, the user will be asked to click on the desired target region....
Uncovering the Preferences Shaping Consumer Data: Matrix Factorization
How do you limit your search when looking for a hotel? Those trying to save money begin with price. Members of hotel reward programs focus on their brand. At other...
New data packages
I’ve released four new data packages to CRAN: babynames, fueleconomy, nasaweather and nycflights13. The goal of these packages is to provide some interesting, and relatively large, datasets to demonstrate...
Plotting the characteristic roots for ARIMA models
When modelling data with ARIMA models, it is sometimes useful to plot the inverse characteristic roots. The following functions will compute and plot the inverse roots for any fitted...
Advanced R Profiling with pbdPAPI
R has some extremely useful utilities for profiling, such as system.time(), Rprof(), the often overlooked tracemem(), and the rbenchmark package. But if you want more than just simple timings...
Chart from R + Color from Javascript
Another color experiment combining resources from R and Javascript. I just wish I could do Mean Phylogenetic Distance in Javascript like rPlotter. I enjoyed using d3.js zoom behavior to...
Rcpp11 3.1.1
R 3.1.1 was released a few days ago, and as part of the policy we are trying to follow for Rcpp11 releases, here is Rcpp11 3.1.1. Sorry for the...
Announcing Packrat v0.4
We’re excited to announce a new release of Packrat, a tool for making R projects more isolated and reproducible by managing their package dependencies. This release brings a number...
Intermission: A Data File For Futures Data (from Quandl)
So between variations of different strategies, for those who have yet to come across it, my IKTrading package has a … Continue reading →
Comrades Marathon: A Race for Geriatrics?
It has been suggested that the average Comrades Marathon runner is gradually getting older. As an “average runner” myself, I will not deny that I am personally getting older....
How to Choose an R-Trainer?
by James Peruvankal There are plenty of options if you want to learn R and are looking for training: your college’s statistics department, massive open online courses like Coursera,...
Rcpp11 t-shirt sightseeing
While we wait for CRAN to process the release of Rcpp11 3.1.1, here are some news about the Rcpp11 t-shirt. With more than 40 attendees, the Rcpp11 tutorial was...
Things I Forget: Push/Pull Greyed out in RStudio?!?
So, on more than one occasion I have set up a repository locally, then on GitHub and pushed to that repo from the shell. This works great, but this...
Introducing tidyr
tidyr is new package that makes it easy to “tidy” your data. Tidy data is data that’s easy to work with: it’s easy to munge (with dplyr), visualise (with...
Note to self: brew cleanup r
Note to self: after updating R with Homebrew remember to cleanup old versions: brew cleanup r Otherwise I'm liable to get a segfault. (see also)
EARL Conference, London, 15-17 September 2014
EARL (Effective Applications of the R Language) is a unique conference dedicated to the growing commercial usage and business applications of R. We currently have less than 100 delegate places...
A Handy Trick for Remote Graphics
I often create plots that require quite a bit of computation. Ideally I would run this on what I’ll call Machine A, which is a very fast machine, but...
Notes from the 2nd R in Insurance Conference
The 2nd R in Insurance conference took place last Monday, 14 July, at Cass Business School London. This one-day conference focused once more on applications in insurance and actuarial...
There’s no mistake in the barley data
Statistics has many canonical data sets. For classification statistics, we have the Fisher's iris data. For Big Data statistics, the canonical data set used in many examples is the...
UseR 2014, days 3-4
Three weeks ago, I’d commented on the first two days of the UseR 2014 conference. I’m finally back to talk about the second half. Dirk Eddelbuettel on Rcpp Dirk...
Plotly: collaborative, publication-quality graphing.
