When you draw a histogram, an important question is “how many bar should I draw?”. This should inspire an indignant response. You didn’t become a programmer to answer questions, did you? No. The whole point of programming is to let your computer do your thinking for you, giving you ... [Read more...]

I've been running for the last couple of months a lot of simulations written in R on legion cluster  here at UCL. But I still do many things on our quad-core server here at the institute, and parallelising the simulations is extremely handy.S... [Read more...]

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I’m helping out some colleagues learn programming from having zero experience with it in any shape or form. It’s quite a daunting task in some senses, because, well, it may not be easy! They are researchers, so they’ll need it for processing data and generating output, and ... [Read more...]

I wanted to see see if I could setup RStudio on a micro instance on Amazon EC2.  I thought it would be nice to have my own instance running in the cloud and why not use AWS free usage tier … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Version of 0.3.0 of the Bayesian Model Averaging package BMS has been released. Apart from numerous bugfixes, BMS 0.3.0 includes two main additions: The ability in bms to keep certain fixed regressors to be included in all sampled models The option t... [Read more...]

Connecting to MySQL is made very easy with the RMySQL package. To connect to a MySQL database simply install the package and load the library.install.packages("RMySQL")library(RMySQL)Connecting to MySQL:Once the RMySQL library is installed create a dat... [Read more...]

Today mostly existed in adding details or changing certain aspects of my graphs. For example, I had to turn around the y-axis on my levelplot, circleplot, … which wasn’t so easy at first. But after a bit of googling I found out I had to rev... [Read more...]

Today I had a meeting with Emmanuel. He is a guy from inside Janssen who is very good with R-scripts. He made a lot of great plots which I had to use for our reports. During the meeting we came to a conclusion that all the difficult R-scripting he did,... [Read more...]

From his presentation at the Greater Boston useR Group[*], R user Jeffrey Breen has shared some useful slides detailing how to bring data from relational databases like MySQL and Oracle. In fact, data from just about any relational database is accessible from R by sending an SQL query to the ... [Read more...]

It's been a while since my last sab-R-metrics post, and I have not gotten to the real fun stuff yet. I apologize for the long layoff, and it's likely that these will be sparse for the next couple weeks. I have had some consulting opportunities come u... [Read more...]

Inspired by the Facebook Social Network chart, FlowingData's Nathan Yau also turns to R to create a beautiful chart of the network of all flight connections between major airlines in the US: Like the Facebook chart, the chart reflects the intensity of the connections (here, the number of flights) between ... [Read more...]

A lot of weird facts (?) can be found on the internet. For instance, about the height of the winner of Presidential elections in the US: the taller always win... "Still, being short does, on average, hurt a person's prospects...The tall guy gets th... [Read more...]

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In this post, I will show: - How to create an Amazon EC2 micro instance - How to login to the EC2 instance using PuTTY - How to install the R source and build it. - Use R in the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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Data Scientist Antonio Piccolboni recently published this comparison of the various language and interfaces available for programming Big Data analysis tasks in the map-reduce framework. The interfaces he reviewed included: Java Hadoop (mature and efficient, but verbose and difficult to program) Cascading (brings an SQL-like flavor to Java programming with ... [Read more...]

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PLINK/SEQ is an open source C/C++ library for analyzing large-scale genome sequencing data. The library can be accessed via the pseq command line tool, or through an R interface. The project is developed independently of PLINK but it's syntax will be f... [Read more...]

We're having problem with starting values in glm(). A very simple logistic regression with just an intercept with a very simple starting value (beta=5) blows up.... [Read more...]