I spent this weekend reading Learning Python (Second Edition for Python 2.3!) by Mark Lutz. Python is my favorite programming language, but my experience with it has been mostly anecdotal; I come up with my own solutions and functions and I Google whatever I do not know. I decided to spend a couple of days with this incredibly out-of-date...
Yesterday, and about nine days after release 0.7.3 of Rcpp (a set of R / C++ interface classes), Romain and I released version 0.7.4. It has been uploaded to CRAN and Debian, and mirrors should already have new versions. As before, my local page is als...
Yesterday, and about nine days after release 0.7.3 of Rcpp (a set of R / C++ interface classes), Romain and I released version 0.7.4. It has been uploaded to CRAN and Debian, and mirrors should already have new versions. As before, my local page is ...
No that is not a typo in the title. In my programming a came across a solution that I thought was pretty cool. I have a function that basically takes two objects and passes the elements of the objects to another function as arguments. This is a pret...
In case you did not read all the slides of Regis Lebrun’s talk on pseudo-random generators I posted yesterday, one result from Marsaglia’s (in a 1968 PNAS paper) exhibited my ignorance during Regis’ Big’ MC seminar on Thursday. Marsaglia indeed showed that all multiplicative congruential generators
lie on a series of hyperplanes whose number gets ridiculously 
As a brief follow up to the series, I want to take a moment to describe a bit about Weka, which is the machine learning tool that we will be using to implement the neural network. It is a fantastic open source JAVA based tool that was developed at the...
I wrote this script for the UCLA Statistical Consulting Center. I don’t know all of the specifics, but one of our faculty members has this idea that we can help our paper, The Daily Bruin, with their graphics or something to that effect. I don’t quite understand because our paper has never really been big on graphics for data,...
The following introduction is to allow viewers to understand the basic concepts and practical implementation of neural nets towards a financial time series. I will not go too deep into detail about the mathematics behind the neural net at the moment. ...
Two very interesting talks at the Big’ MC seminar on Thursday:
– Phylogenetic models and MCMC methods for the reconstruction of language history by Robin Ryder
– Uniform and non-uniform random generators by Régis Lebrun
which are both on topics close to my interest, evolution of languages (I’ll be a philologist in another life!) and uniform random generators.
Filed 
The American Statistical Association recently created a new, bi-annual award to to recognize an individual or team for innovation in computing, software, or graphics that has had a great impact on statistical practice or research. The committee has just announced the winner (or in this, joint winners) of the first award: Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka, for their work...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
