This post was written by Phil. A medical company is testing a cancer drug. They get a 16 genetically identical (or nearly identical) rats that all have the same kind of tumor, give 8 of them the drug and leave 8 untreated…or maybe they give them a placebo, I don’t know; ... [Read more...]

Condensed from this post (and comments) on David Chudzicki’s blog, tweaked, and updated for R-2.13.1. Assumes you’re starting with a virgin “Amazon Linux” AMI. I picked “Basic 64-bit Amazon Linux AMI 2011.02.1 Beta” (AMI Id: ami-8e1fece7) because it was marked as free tier eligible on the “Quick ... [Read more...]

Kent Osband writes: [Read more...]

As announced by the R core team, R 2.13.1 has been released on schedule today. For those who build R themselves, updated source code is available now; pre-built binaries will propagate through the CRAN network over the next couple of days. This update includes some minor bug fixes to graphics, fixes ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

So, I decided to sit down and have a little fun with that Failed States Index data I put together. To start, I expect that the dataset will be pretty linearly correlated with the polity IV data. This makes sense–true democracies aren’t failed states, and failed states tend ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

If you want the graphics you create with R to look their best, in general it's best to go for a vector-based graphics format instead of a raster-based format. Common formats like GIF and JPG are raster-based: the image is composed of pixels, and if you don't choose a high ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Rick Wicklin contacted me with a helpful suggestion for improving the data presentation method outlined in my  previous post on using ggplot2 to visualize some data. In the previous post I had plotted up a highly correlated set of points, showing the correspondence between maximum daily body temperatures of model ... [Read more...]

Yesterday I posted a very simple math puzzle to Twitter that I found in Jonathan Baron’s book, Thinking and Deciding. The puzzle is the following: Show that every number of the form ABC,ABC is divisible by 13. The puzzle comes up in Baron’s book as an example of ... [Read more...]

Ask anyone how much time has elapsed since September last year and they’ll probably start counting on their fingers: “October, November…” and tell you “just over 9 months.” So, when faced as I was today with a data frame (named dates) like this: How to add a 7th column, with ... [Read more...]

I recently read Ewan Birney's blog post, which I found echoed a lot of my own thoughts about the use of statistical in computational biology. I thought I would compile my own similar list but for bioinformatics  / computational biology in general. I have not been and in the field as ... [Read more...]

Dave Backus points me to this review by anthropologist Mike McGovern of two books by economist Paul Collier on the politics of economic development in Africa. My first reaction was that this was interesting but non-statistical so I’d have to either post it on the sister blog or wait ... [Read more...]

Examining the determinants of credit default swap (CDS) spreads is a hot topic, CDS spread has displayed siginificant regime switching behaviour since the break of credit crisis, which can be seen from the old graph in the post Credit Default Spread a... [Read more...]

Today, the AG Statistical Computing released the “Call for a Special Topic on Grid and Cloud Computing” in the Journal “Methods of Information in Medicine”. We are inviting submissions for a special topic of Methods of Information in Medicine on “Grid and Cloud Computing Methods in Biomedical Research“. This special ... [Read more...]

In short: R is a free intuitive programming language that is used by practitioners in a plethora of academic disciplines. Therefore, it is on the cutting edge, and expanding rapidly. It creates stunning visuals, works seamlessly together with LaTeX, has really good online documentation and the community is unparalleled. [1, 2, 3, 4] A ... [Read more...]

A maintenance release version 0.9.5 of Rcpp is now on CRAN and in Debian. This release comprises a number of minor fixes, extensions as well as small additions to the documentation and examples which have accumulated since the last release in Apr... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

The raster package defines classes and methods for spatial raster data access and manipulation. The new rasterVis package complements raster providing a set of methods for enhanced visualization and interaction. It is now at CRAN. Several examples can ... [Read more...]