On December 11, 2006 Felipe Calderon, as the first significant act of his presidency, sent the army to his home state of Michoacan. He claimed that it was to regain control of territories lost to the drug cartels, and indeed, a new cartel had started operating in Michocan. But the fact that ... [Read more...]

The minor bug-fix release 0.2.3 of RcppArmadillo went to CRAN this morning. It adds a tiny bit of configuration to permit Sun Studio / suncc to successfully build the package. There is no code change, and no configuration change for the other platfo... [Read more...]

There's yet another local R user group launching this week, this time in Kassell, in central Germany. Their first meeting is on June 24. If my rusty German is holding up, looks like there will be some good discussion on editors and GUIs, how to find packages and functions, and R ... [Read more...]

My favorite software is Matlab, but partly because R is free, more and more people & companies choose to use R as a major working language. Nothing wrong with that, I am at the moment changing some of my Kalman Filter Matlab codes to R.One bothering issue is each software ... [Read more...]

Can we make our analysis using the R statistical computing and analysis platform run faster? Usually the answer is yes, and the best way is to improve your algorithm and variable selection. But recently David Smith was suggesting that a big benefit of their (commercial) version of R was that ... [Read more...]

About Clustergrams In 2002, Matthias Schonlau published in “The Stata Journal” an article named “The Clustergram: A graph for visualizing hierarchical and . As explained in the abstract: In hierarchical cluster analysis dendrogram graphs are used to visualize how clusters are formed. I propose an alternative graph named “clustergram” to examine how ... [Read more...]

Last morn, I had the surprise of receiving the following email: This is to inform you that the following abstract has been submitted to the 3rd International Conference of the ERCIM WG on COMPUTING & STATISTICS (ERCIM’10) Ab#: 114 Title: Goodness of Fit Via Mixtures of Beta distributions Keywords: nonparametric estimation, posterior ... [Read more...]

I wanted a “lightweight” version of Eclipse to run R from Ubuntu. (I installed eclipse-pde using apt-get. It worked fine.) Once it was running, I installed StatEt via the “Install new software” feature from http://download.walware.de/eclipse-3.5. While it was downloading, I … Continue reading → [Read more...]

For R users in the Southern Hemisphere on the other side of the Prime Meridian, there are two new entries in the Local R User Group Directory: Sydney and South Asia. The Sydney group wins the prize for the best group acronym ever: SURF. The Sydney Users of R Forum ... [Read more...]

What if you wanted to randomly place objects into a field, and the more objects you had, the more they rejected newcomers placed nearby? To find out, I setup a simulation. The code, shown at the end, isn’t all that interesting, and the plots shown below aren’t all ... [Read more...]

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useR!2010 is coming. I am going to give two talks there (I will write more of that soon), but in the meantime, please note that the online registration deadline is coming to an end. This was published on the R-help mailing list today: ————- The final registration deadline for the ... [Read more...]

Previously we considered the R Commander interface as a simple GUI for the R statistical software system. Here we will look at how to undertake data manipulation and creating basic statistical summaries of data sets. Fast Tube by Casper The R Commander GUI has two menus “Data” and “Statistics” that ... [Read more...]

Neil Gunther has pointed out on his blog that the prime number decomposition R package schoolmath contains mistakes in the function primes, listing 1 as a prime number but also including decomposable numbers like 133 in its list of prime numbers: __ primes(100,140) [1] 101 107 111 113 123 129 131 137 __ primes(50,140) [1]  [...] [Read more...]

A few month after the 0.8.9 release, we have another small update to beancounter. This version fixes a minor infelicity in the manual page (thanks to an Ubuntu and then Debian bug report) as well as a small coding bug where 'USD' was hard-coded when t... [Read more...]

Here we are in Part III. Wait!? What happened to Parts I and II? Well, I started to write an article about Amdahl's law, parallelism and prime numbers, but found myself buried three levels deep trying to resolve problems with prime numbers in R. My normal inclination is to use ... [Read more...]

Data must be selected carefully.  The predictive usefulness of the model is grossly diminished if outliers taint the available data.  Figure 1, for instance, shows the Defense spending (as a fraction of the national budget) between 1948 and 1968. Note how the trend curve (as defined by our linear difference model from the ... [Read more...]

As per request, here is the code that I wrote to draw bifurcation plots in R. Bifurcation diagrams for discrete maps can be done using this code by James Jones. It is a little easier since approximation is not needed. In the following code, I used the deSolve library to ... [Read more...]

The standard, textbook way to represent a density function looks like this: Perhaps you have seen this before? (Plot created in R, all source code from this post is included at the end). Not only will you find this plot in statistics books, you’ll also see it in medical ... [Read more...]

I've spent some more time thinking about how best to put together the package for creating web-friendly, interactive data visualizations in R. I have a pretty substantial JavaScript package that does a lot of basic visualizations now, and it's really exciting to see where this is going. With this in ... [Read more...]