Earlier this week, Conrad Sanderson issued a minor bug fix release 2.0.2 of his Armadillo library which provides templated C++ code for linear algebra. We wrapped that into a new RcppArmadillo release 0.2.26 and shipped it to CRAN. Due to it being su...
Monthly Archives: July 2011
Passing non-graphical parameters to graphical functions using …
Argument passing via ... is a great feature of the R language, allowing you to write wrappers around existing functions that do not need to list all the arguments of the wrapped function. ... is used extensively in S3 methods … Continue reading →
RomanM’s Method
I’ve succeeded in getting a version of RomanM and JeffId’s Thermal hammer working with version 1.3 of RghcnV3. This is going to be a long post because there is a lot of ground to cover. First, some errata, the “Globe” demo in V1.3 appears to have a missing line, looks like an editor bug, so 
Clustering U.S. Senators using roll call voting data
For our forthcoming book on machine learning for hackers, John Myles White and I will discuss clustering, and various methods for doing so. One common method for clustering observations
IBM Netezza: Embrace open source analytics
Earlier this month Thomas Dinsmore, solutions architect for IBM Netezza’s Advanced Analytics team, had a great blog post on why companies should embrace R as an analytics platform. He says: There are three main reasons R should be part of your enterprise analytics architecture: R has capabilities not available in commercial analytics software Usage of R by analysts is...
A bit of fun with R
R isn't just about serious things like model inference and prediction intervals and big analytics. Sometimes, R lets its hair down and just does weird and wonderful things because ... well just because. For example, with a package from Paulo Sonego, it can display your favourite XKCD cartoon: > install.packages("RXKCD", repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org",type="source") > searchXKCD("support") num title 1 8 Red spiders...
A Plot of 250 Random Walks
For some reason I feel like plotting some random walks. Nothing groundbreaking, but hopefully this post will be useful to someone. Here's my R code:# Generate k random walks across time {0, 1, ... , T}T <- 100k <- 250initial.value <- 10GetRa...
Le Monde puzzle [#28]
![Le Monde puzzle [#28]](http://feeds.wordpress.com/1.0/comments/xianblog.wordpress.com/11469/)
The puzzle of last weekend in Le Monde was about finding the absolute rank of x9 when given the relative ranks of x1,….,x8 and the possibility to ask for relative ranks of three numbers at a time. In R terms, this means being able to use or yet being able to sort the first 8 
Uwe Ligges joins R-core
TU Dortmund professor Uwe Ligges is now a member of R-core, the group of 20 leading statisticians and computer scientists who oversee the R Project and develop and maintain the source code for the R engine and its core packages. Uwe has been very active in the R project for many years: he maintains the system that builds Windows...
Parallel random forests using foreach
There's been some discussion on the kaggle forums and on a few blogs about various ways to parallelize random forests, so I thought I'd add my thoughts on the issue.Here's my version of the 'parRF' function, which is based on the elegant version in the...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
