There's another new R User Group, this time in Boston: the New England R User Group. Their first meeting will be on Tuesday, May 25. Get all the info by joining the Google Group at the link below. Google Groups: New England R User Group [Read more...]
Josh had kindly invited me to post on FOSS Trading around the time when he first came up with the idea for the blog. Fast forward a year and I am finally taking him up on his offer.I'll start by highlighting that while all the software in this post ... [Read more...]
I was recently asked to give a talk to our graduate school annual conference. I offered several titles and the one they picked was Using R in research. I'm not sure if this was a good idea or not. The graduate school covers PhD students across three ar... [Read more...]
Several readers emailed me or left a comment on my previous announcement of Frank Harrell's workshop on using Sweave for reproducible research asking if we could record the seminar. Unfortunately we couldn't record audio or video, but take a look a... [Read more...]
Although I haven't been all that much of a fan of moving average based methods, I've observed some discussions and made some attempts to determine if it's possible to get an actual smoothed filter with a causal model. Anyone who's worked on financial ...
The function pimax from our package mcsm is used in to reproduce Figure 5.11 of our book Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R. (The name comes from using the Pima Indian R benchmark as the reference dataset.) I got this email from Josué I ran the ‘pimax’ example from the mcsm ...
When fitting a multiple linear regression model to data a natural question is whether a model can be simplified by excluding variables from the model. There are automatic procedures for undertaking these tests but some people prefer to follow a more manual approach to variable selection rather than pressing a ...
It was quite the media frenzy for Revolution and R last week. In conjunction with our relaunch as Revolution Analytics, we spoke to more than a dozen journalists and analysts to explain why we think R is at the center of a perfect storm for predictive analytics: with routine collection ... [Read more...]
What languages and tools should you learn as a math/stat consultant? To jump to the answer: Excel/VBA, SQL, R, Java, and Python. Spreadsheets have many problems with verifiability and scalability, so why Excel? Excel is: Useful for prototyping ideas quickly, either for your own use or to show ... [Read more...]
See a the poll here by Gabriel Rossman at Code and Culture. I voted for R and ‘igraph’. If you use R you are getting access to all the other wonderful things that come with R. Using specialized package, like Pajek, UCINET etc requires constant going back and forth between ... [Read more...]
I recently wrote a serial connection for R-2.11.0 so that I can communicate with serial devices, for example an old Garmin eTrex Legend. This GPS device is able to output NMEA0183 sentences to a standard serial port (4800,8,1,N). I hooked up the device and used the serial connection to collect ... [Read more...]
Frank Harrell, chair of the Biostatistics department here at Vanderbilt, is giving a seminar entitled "Sweave for Reproducible Research and Beautiful Statistical Reports" tomorrow, Wednesday, May 12, 1:30-2:30pm, in the MRBIII Conference Room 1220. This tutorial covers the basics of Sweave and shows how to enhance the default output in various ... [Read more...]
I was discussing some subject with my kids - can't recall if it was in the realm of astronomy, computing, or moder economics. In any case, it involved large numbers. I fired up R to do a quick calculation:__ 1000000000 / 1000The resulting answer was ...
If you attended Frank Harrell's Regression Modeling Strategies course a few weeks ago, you got a chance to see the rms package for R in action. Frank's rms package does regression modeling, testing, estimation, validation, graphics, prediction, and ty... [Read more...]
I'll be giving a live webinar on Thursday next week (May 20) titled Introduction to Revolution R. If you're new to the R world and wondering what you can do with R, this webinar is for you. I'll also be introducing some of the functionality unique to Revolution R included in ... [Read more...]
Why is the function to print out text in R named "cat"? Why is the function to delete objects called "rm"? Unless you have a background in Unix (or Linux) programming, some of R's command names can seem, well, a bit arcane. Jeromy Anglim explains the provenance of many of ... [Read more...]
Just a short note concerning a “gotcha”. As I have many times before, I opened an R console on my newly-upgraded (to lucid 10.04) Ubuntu machine, typed source(“http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R”) and began a Bioconductor install with biocLite(). Only this time, I saw this: Error in dyn.load(file, ... [Read more...]
I found text and title early on but was initially confounded when trying to add text outside of an actual chart. As it turns out, I needed to understand a bit about R's concept of margins in a chart__ par(oma=c(2,2,2,2))__ plot(rnorm)__ mtext('The label'...
String concatenation is a rather basic function - but my particular programming reflexes did not help me figure out how to do this in R. I tried the + and & operator, and even the || operator to no avail. Also tried concat() function... no dice. ...