The solution to puzzle 48 given in Le Monde this weekend is rather direct (which makes me wonder why the solution for 6 colours is still unavailable..) Here is a quick version of the solution: Consider one column, 1 say. Since 326=5×65+1, there exists one value c with at least 66 equal to c. Among [...] [Read more...]

I’ve just uploaded a new binary of ProjectTemplate to GitHub. This is a draft version of the next release, v0.2-1, which includes some fairly substantial changes and is backwards incompatible in several ways with previous versions of ProjectTemplate. Foremost of the changes is that most of the logic ... [Read more...]

In a few weeks I will be visiting Chicago, and JD Long—the organizer of the local R users group—has graciously invited me to give a presentation. Ostensibly, the presentation will be on my recently released infochimps package, so I thought it was a good time to start actually ... [Read more...]

SOME EMPIRICAL BASES FOR CHOOSING CERTAIN RISK REPRESENTATIONS OVER OTHERS This week DSN posts some thoughts (largely inspired by the work of former colleagues Stephanie Kurzenhäuser, Ralph Hertwig, Ulrich Hoffrage, and Gerd Gigerenzer) about communicating risks to the general public, providing references and delicious downloads where possible. Representations to ... [Read more...]

Here's a clever way to express your objection to the obtrusiveness of the new backscatter X-ray scanners at airports: A T-shirt with the text of the 4th Amendment printed in metallic ink: Also available in underwear format. Cargo Collective: 4th Amendment Wear [Read more...]

Today I had a great reminder of why I love open source software and why I spend a bit of my time contributing R code to several packages. In the vegan, I had included some code to do an analysis … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Amanda Cox of the New York Times' graphics department recently gave a great presentation to the New Media Days conference in Copenhagen and described how the Times uses data visualizations to reveal patterns, provide context, describe relationships, and even create a sense of wonder about the world. In the video, ... [Read more...]

he formatR package has been silent for quite a few months now. Recently I’ve been moving my old packages from R-Forge to GitHub, and I finally killed several things on my TODO list. In the past, I made an awkward decision to let formatR depend on the animation package, ... [Read more...]

While drinking these fine liquids may up your trip count to the john, they can also make your R reports better. Not because they allow you to reach your Ballmer Peak… but because each of these elixers is the direct result of brewing. Okay, I’m rea... [Read more...]

I've been contributing to Rcpp for about a year now, initially to add missing bits that were needed for the development of RProtoBuf. This led to a complete redesign of the API, which now goes way beyond the initial code (that we now call c... [Read more...]

Following on from the previous post about creating a football result processing function for data from the football-data.co.uk website we will add code to the function to generate a league table based on the results to date. To create the league table we need to count various things ... [Read more...]

The Google AI Challenge recently wrapped up with a Lisp developer from Hungary as the winner.  The competition challenges contestants to create bots that push the limits of AI and game theory.  These bots compete against one another, and a complete ranking of competitors is available.  The big story today ... [Read more...]

The translation of the book Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R is close to being completed. The copy-editing and page-setting are done, I have received the cover proposal and am happy with it, so it should now go to production and be ready by early January, (earlier than the tentative ... [Read more...]

The next release of pgfSweave is now on CRAN! It has been a while since I posted about pgfSweave and there have been some significant changes in the past couple of months. The main new features are: Automatic code highlighting via the highlight package. This can be turned off with ... [Read more...]

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Last month TDWI's James Powell interviewed Revolution CEO Norman Nie and published the interview as "R 101". The article answers some of the basic questions about R, such as: What is R? Why is R well-suited for predictive analytics? Why is R superior? How easy is it to learn R? Where ... [Read more...]

For all those who think that Vim is The Editor for text files, and simultaneously think that R is The EnvironmentForStatisticalAnalysisAndGraphics. After trying out various options for intergrating Vim with R I settled on the following configuration: Use Vim-R-pluginfor editing R code files, R documentation files (*.Rd) as well as ... [Read more...]

Acceptance-rejection methods This post is based on chapter 1.4 of Advanced Markov Chain Monte Carlo. Another method of generating random variates from distributions is to use acceptance-rejection methods. Basically to generate a random number from , we generate a RN from an envelope distribution , where .  The acceptance-rejection algorithm is as follows: Repeat ... [Read more...]

The final course (since courses end this week in Montréal) can be watched here and there. The drawings from the course can be downloaded here (including last week's). First, to come back on last week's course , we considered Lee-carter model, i.e.... [Read more...]

must admit that I have been tired of maintaining my R packages for a long time, and the main reason is I feel really uncomfortable with writing R documentations (Rd). The required structure of an R package mainly includes two directories R and man — the former for the R source ... [Read more...]