# Monthly Archives: August 2011

## The Visual Difference – R and Anscombe’s Quartet

August 30, 2011
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I spent a chunk of today trying to get my thoughts in order for a keynote presentation at next week’s The Difference that Makes a Difference conference. The theme of my talk will be on how visualisations can be used to discover structure and pattern in data, and as in many or my other recent

## Getting Started with Latent Dirichlet Allocation using RTextTools + topicmodels

RTextTools bundles a host of functions for performing supervised learning on your data, but what about other methods like latent Dirichlet allocation? With some help from the topicmodels package, we can get started with LDA in just five steps. Text in green can be executed within R.Step 1: Install RTextTools + topicmodelsWe begin by installing and loading RTextTools and...

## Getting Started with Latent Dirichlet Allocation using RTextTools + topicmodels

RTextTools bundles a host of functions for performing supervised learning on your data, but what about other methods like latent Dirichlet allocation? With some help from the topicmodels package, we can get started with LDA in just five steps. Text in

## Nomograms everywhere!

August 30, 2011
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At useR!, Jonty Rougier talked about nomograms, a once popular visualisation that has fallen by the wayside with the rise of computers. I’d seen a few before, but hadn’t understood how they worked or why you’d want to use them. Anyway, since that talk I’ve been digging around in biology books from the 60s and

## R combined gps-track plot of spatial intensity

August 30, 2011
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To get a quick impression about the temporal stay of places it is helpful to generate a plot of the trackpoints spatial density (intensity). As the 3d visualisation has both advatages and disadvantages, a combination with a 2D plot is useful to interpret the data. The data used in this example is a gps record

## Realized beta and beta equal 1

August 30, 2011
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What does beta look like in the out-of-sample period for the portfolios generated to have beta equal to 1? In the comments Ian Priest wonders if the results in “The effect of beta equal 1″ are due to a shift in beta from the estimation period to the out-of-sample period.  (The current post will make … Continue reading...

## How Much of R is Written in R Part 2: Contributed Packages

August 29, 2011
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So that mean old boss of mine is at it again.  This morning I came in beaming about how many people had read my post How Much of R is Written in R (thanks by the way!).  He then asks me about one little line in that post; the one about how if you looked

## Sharing live R functions with OpenCPU

August 29, 2011
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OpenCPU is a new initiative from R user Jeroen Ooms to make innovations in statistics, visualization and data-science more widely applicable. Based on open-source principles, it's a web-based service that lets you upload data visualizations and analyses as R scripts, and allow others to run them on demand. For example, you can upload a script to visualize a company's...

## another lottery coincidence

August 29, 2011
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$another lottery coincidence$

Once again, meaningless figures are published about a man who won the French lottery (Le Loto) for the second time. The reported probability of the event is indeed one chance out of 363 (US) trillions (i.e., billions in the metric system. or 1012)… This number is simply the square of which is the number of