I finally have time to try parallel computing in R using snowfall/snow thanks to this article in the 1st issue of R journal, which replaces R news. I didn’t try it before because i didn’t have a good toy example, and it seemed like a steep learning ... [Read more...]

What do you use for network analysis? I found the Wikipedia list of network software entirely overwhelming. I wanted to test out some of the introductory tools, but avoid the trap of sinking my time into a dead-end software project. (Remember learning Minitab in freshman statistics? How often do you ... [Read more...]

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Most people using LaTex feel that creating tables is no fun. Some days ago I stumbled across a neat function written by Paul Johnson that produces LaTex code as well as LaTex code that can be used within Lyx. The output can be used for regression models and looks like ... [Read more...]

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bugsparallel is a Metrum Institute project to run BUGS (via R2WinBUGS) in parallel - McMC is an application, where parallel runs can be used very efficientlly. Here is the code for one example using bugsparallel.Some usefull links:Rosenthal, Parallel c... [Read more...]

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Pew Research has found that 79% of Americans believe in The Second Coming of Jesus. What worries me more is not that 4 out of 5 Americans believe in The Second Coming, but that 1 out of 5 believes it will happen in their lifetime. It seems inevitable t... [Read more...]

Just recently, I was contacted by a researcher who wanted to use influence.ME to obtain model estimates from which iteratively some data was deleted. In his case, observations were nested within an area, but there were very unequal numbers of ... [Read more...]

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The New York Times published this interesting article on how the ability to design and perform computer simulations is a highly marketable skill for careers across many disciplines.In methodology development we use simulation nearly every day. We've developed our own specialized genetic data simulation software, genomeSIMLA, that's freely available ... [Read more...]

Currently preparing a presentation on analyzing influential data in mixed effects models myself, my eye fell on an article in which important claims on racial prejudice were refuted. An important aspect of the criticism on existing work, is that in ... [Read more...]

I like the "multicore" library for a particular task. I can easily write a combination of if(require("multicore",...)) that means that my function will automatically use the parallel mclapply() instead of lapply() where it is available. Which is grand 99% of the time, except when my function is called from ... [Read more...]

As part of our Red State, Blue State research, we developed statistical tools for estimating public opinion among subsets of the population. Recently Yu-Sung Su, Yair Ghitza, and I applied these methods to see where school vouchers are more or... [Read more...]

The Economist recently ran a fascinating article about the emergence of geographical databases and their uses for presenting and analyzing data.All this has made it much easier to create maps that explain—at a glance—something that might otherwise require pages of tables or verbiage. “A percentage or a ... [Read more...]

I've linked to UCLA's stat computing resources once before on a previous post about choosing the right analysis for the questions your asking and the data types you have. Here's another section of the same website that has code to run an identical analysis in all of these statistical packages, ... [Read more...]

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Somebody on the R-help mailing list asked how to get Rmpi working on his Fedora Linux machine so he could do high-performance computing on a cluster of machines (or a single multicore machine) using the R statistical computing and analysis platform. Since it is unusually painful to get working, I ... [Read more...]