Michael Blum and Olivier François, along with Katalin Csillery, just released an R package entitled abc. (I am surprised the name was not already registered!) Its aim is obviously to implement ABC approximations for Bayesian inference: Description The ’abc’ package provides various functions for parameter estimation and model selection ... [Read more...]

As a quick note, here are two R packages that were mentioned to me recently and that look promising: reldist and mixtools. [Read more...]

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This is Part 3 of a five-part article series, with new parts published each Thursday. You can download the complete article from the Revolution Analytics website. Power from Elegance If the R movement has a genuine rock star, it’s probably Hadley Wickham. He’s an assistant professor and the Dobelman ... [Read more...]

Second stop of my world tour was chicago yesterday night, where I presented a quick light review of various ways to represent objects in R: lexical scoping, S3, S4, the new reference classes and also with C++ using Rcpp modules or RProtoBuf My sli... [Read more...]

There is a lot of hype in media about Ponting's best days being behind him. While he's rebuilding a fresh Aussie team, everyone is putting more pressure on him by comparing his performance with Tendulkar's. Leave him alone!We have the privilege of watc... [Read more...]

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Getting presence data of species is often not easy and can be a major obstacle when attempting to model the distribution of species. One way is using the GBIF data base. Here I show one way how to obtain presence … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I had some troubles installing rJava on Ubuntu. The easiest solution I found was installing from the command line using: Then it worked without any problems. [Read more...]

The tikzDevice package is quite amazing. Here are two graphs I just made, with (lower) and without (upper) using the tikzDevice package. The difference in quality is huge.Since the LaTeX source file for the figure is quite large in size and may take si... [Read more...]

As I described in this post, the reported number of homicides[1] in Chihuahua during 2009 turned out to be incomplete. Guess what? The SNSP just released [xls file] an updated version of the homicide data, and Chihuahua went from having 2,523 homicides to 3,156. My estimate was 3,256, so I came pretty close. And ... [Read more...]

In honor of the first World Statistics Day I thought I would share some of my favorite R links.  R is a free software statistical computing environment for performing all sorts of data and mathematical manipulation.Introduction and TutorialsR Tuto... [Read more...]

Apparently today is the first ever World Statistics Day. I only knew about it because I'd seen a couple of passing references to it from the stats folks I follow on Twitter. But I guess this UN-sponsored event is a big deal, judging from the official website: The celebration of ... [Read more...]

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One of the benefits of using R for statistical analysis is the programming language which allows users to define their own functions, which is particularly useful for analysis that needs to be repeated. For example, a monthly output from a database may be provided in a pre-determined format and we ... [Read more...]

Central Limit Theorem A nice illustration of the Central Limit Theorem by convolution.in R: Heaviside 0,1,0) }HH [Read more...]

I try to compile the source code of R 2.12 on CentOS, but it throw an error when trying to install *cluster*. * installing *source* package ‘cluster’ ... Read More: 3800 Words Totally [Read more...]

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For over a year now, i've been collecting how much time i spend in computer and how much of it is actually used in creative/productive activities. By productive activity i mean that the time spent in text editor(emacs), terminal, excel or a datab... [Read more...]

Last weekend, my friend and coauthor Jean-Michel Marin was interviewed (as Jean-Claude Marin, sic!) by a national radio about the probability of the replication of a draw on the Israeli Lottery. Twice the same series of numbers appeared within a month. This lotery operates on a principle of 6/37 + 1/8: 6 numbers are ... [Read more...]