Using the Gutenberg Project’s free text of Don Quijote + Unix for Poets, here are the most used (non-short) words in Miguel de Cervantes’ famous work: 2167 Quijote 2145 Sancho 1331 porque 1053 respondió 1027 había  900 merced  813 vuestra  79... [Read more...]

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Sometimes when working with small paired data-sets it is nice to see/show all the data in a structured form. For example when looking at pre-post comparisons, connected dots are a natural way to visualize which data-points belong together. In R this can be easily be combined with boxplots expressing ... [Read more...]

I recently found myself in the unpleasant situation of needing to read a Stata .dta file, but not having Stata readily available to me. Normally, I’d fire up a text editor and deconstruct the file, except Stata saves its data in a proprietary Binary format, meaning it garbles some ... [Read more...]

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Real-estate search website Trulia has a new tool to help you in your choice of a new home: crime maps. With local police forces being much better about sharing data crime maps are nothing new, but Trulia takes it to the next level with a slick user interface for navigating ... [Read more...]

I have been using R for about two years, with no previous coding background. So, I feel like the title says, “always learn and never know”. This time, I decided to use R to study a simple, non-statistical problem that came up some time ago. Suppose the exponential function 2^x ... [Read more...]

In this post, I provide a simple script for merging a set of files in a directory into a single, …Continue reading » [Read more...]

Co-developers Jake Bowers, Ben Hansen and I are happy to announce that our R packages optmatch and RItools have new homes on GitHub. We had previously been managing development on private subversion repositories and managed the projects through an ad-h... [Read more...]

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Patrick Burns offers his selections from the presentations at the R/Finance 2011 conference. Check out his post for overviews of some great presentations (and truly, there's some awesome content available to download). I'll add another of my favourites: Bryan Lewis's presentation of his interface from R to the betfair betting ... [Read more...]

With Lynn Vavreck at UCLA, I ran parallel public opinion surveys in Australia and the United States, measuring attitudes on security, the fight against terrorism, the wars in Afghanistan etc, some 10 years after the 9/11 attacks. Full report here (gene... [Read more...]

In preparation for a talk, I updated Knuth's original diagram in Donald E. Knuth. Literate programming. The Computer Journal, 27(2):97–111, May 1984. The new diagram is Sweave specific. Click the Sweave diagram for a PDF version, or right-click and select 'save image as' for the PNG version. Permission is granted for any ... [Read more...]

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I got this book as a reference for my work with R and do like it. Just after browsing the chapters I already found some useful hints about loading and manipulating data, e.g., loading of fixed-width data files! [Read more...]

It seems that Rserve works in a 1 byte charactersystem. This was giving us strange results. When I read in data from KNIME with strange characters like µ the errors began. Every time I used the character “µ”, my output in Rserve would be:... [Read more...]

Last week I pushed an update of my analogue package to CRAN. The last release (0.6-23) was on CRAN sometime in Mar 2010 so an update was well overdue. This (0.7-0) is a major update to analogue containing lots of … Continue reading → [Read more...]