Lighting Up Way back in the day, folks believed that smoking was not only cool but also completely safe. As Marcel Danesi states in his book Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things, Second Edition: An Introduction to Semiotics ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. The FDA goes on the record that it's OK to use R for drug trials. A review of talks at the useR! 2012 conference. Using the negative binomial distribution to convert monthly fecundity into ... [Read more...]

A couple of days ago, I had posted a short Python script to convert numpy files into a simple binary format which R can read quickly. Nice, but still needing an extra file. Shortly thereafter, I found Carl Rogers cnpy library which makes reading and writing numpy files from C++ ... [Read more...]

http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2012/07/importing-public-data-with-sas-instructions-into-r.html Q: How do you make a hairless primate? Answer 1: Take a hairy primate, wait a few million years and see if Darwin was right. Answer 2: Make them work i... [Read more...]

Many public agencies release data in a fixed-format ASCII (FWF) format. But with the data all packed together without separators, you need a "data dictionary" defining the column widths (and metadata about the variables) to make sense of them. Unfortunately, many agencies make such information available only as a SAS ... [Read more...]

Lets go one with the second part of learning R by doing R (you will find the first part here. As we have used vectors, matrices and loops in the first part, we will concentrate on graphics in this one. but first we will need data to plot: Sometimes you ... [Read more...]

[This article was first published on Xi'an's Og » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here) Want to share your [Read more...]

I'm anticipating presenting research of mine based on Bayesian graphical models to an audience that might not be familiar with them. When presenting ordinary regression results, there's already the sort of statistical sniper questions along the lines o... [Read more...]

The TIOBE Community Programming Index ranks the popularity of programming languages, but from a programming language perspective rather than as analytical software (http://www.tiobe.com). It extracts measurements from blogs, entries in Wikipedia, books on Amazon, search engine results, etc. and combines them into a single index. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The Tenth Australasian Data Mining Conference (AusDM 2012) Sydney, Australia, 5-7 December 2012 http://ausdm12.togaware.com/ The Australasian Data Mining Conference has established itself as the premier Australasian meeting for both practitioners and researchers in data mining. This year’s conference, AusDM’12, co-hosted … Continue reading → [Read more...]

by Yanchang Zhao, RDataMining.com It is a 270-page book on data mining with Excel. It can be downloaded as a PDF file at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.83.1393&rep=rep1&type=pdf. Below is its table of contents. - Overview of the Data Mining Process - ... [Read more...]

In previous posts I described how to input data stored on GitHub directly into R. You can do the same thing with source code stored on GitHub. Hadley Wickham has actually made the whole process easier by combining the getURL, textConnection, and source commands into one function: source_url. This ... [Read more...]

(by Dimitris Rizopoulos) Dear R-users, I’d like to announce the release of version 1.0-0 of package JM (already available from CRAN) for the joint modeling of [Read more...]

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The 13th in Project Euler is one big number problem: Work out the first ten digits of the sum of the following one-hundred 50-digit numbers. Obviously, there are some limits in machine representation of numbers. In R, 2^(-1074) is the smallest … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Over the last few weeks, I’ve made a concerted effort to develop a basic suite of optimization algorithms for Julia so that Matlab programmers used to using fminunc() and R programmers used to using optim() can start to transition code over to Julia that requires access to simple optimization ... [Read more...]

I’m developing a streamlined syntax for the next release of futile.paradigm. While this version is backwards compatible, it introduces a …Continue reading » [Read more...]

If you haven’t worked with the gWidgets package it’s worth some time exploring it which is what I’ve been doing for a little paleo project I’ve been working on. After struggling with the few demos and tutorials I could find I went ahead and bought the ... [Read more...]

Geography is often about statistics as it is the basis for fast exchange of information: providing a mean and standard deviation to the audience is often much easier then showing raw data: Learning a script language for this purpose can be a hard-ass work. But I think it is more ... [Read more...]

The code is horrible and the visualisations quite possibly misleading, but I’m dead tired and there are a couple of tricks in the following R code that I want to remember, so here’s a contrived bit of fumbling with some data of the form: enjoyCompany tooMuchFamily 1 strongly agree ... [Read more...]