Editor’s Note: This post written by Roger Peng and Jeff Leek.  A couple of weeks ago, we announced that we would be teaching free courses in Computing for Data Analysis and Data Analysis on the Coursera platform. At the same time, a number of ot... [Read more...]

In his 2004 paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, Steven Peck argues: Simulation models can be used to mimic complex systems, but unlike nature, can be manipulated in ways that would be impossible, too costly or unethical to do in natural systems. Simulation can add to theory development and testing, ... [Read more...]

R is great for exploring, analysing and graphing your valuable data. No question about it. Unfortunately though, there’s no base package support for importing data directly from MS Excel. This means that you have to faff about saving it in another format, and THEN import this new file. This ... [Read more...]

Dear readers, this blog is moving out from wordpress.com to a new location. The new address is http://bc.bojanorama.pl. Please update your bookmarks. Drodzy czytelnicy, blog “Brokering Closure” wyprowadza się z wordpress.com pod nowy adres: http://bc.bojanorama.pl. Zaktualizujcie swoje linki/zakładki. Filed under: ... [Read more...]

A new release 0.2.5 of RProtoBuf is now on CRAN. RProtoBuf provides GNU R bindings for the Google Protobuf data encoding library used and released by Google. This release once again contains a number of patches kindly contributed by Murray Stokely... [Read more...]

A recent question was asked on the R-sig-Debian on installing the development version of R alongside the stable version. While most users of R do not need to have two versions installed on their machine, it is useful if you are developing packages for... [Read more...]

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The Olympics are a big deal on a global scale. How big? Perhaps Paula Radcliffe (an English long distance runner) said it best: "I have achieved a lot and I'm grateful for that - I'm just a bit greedy because I want to add the Olympics. It's... [Read more...]

How Many Data Scientists Are There?I've seen a lot of articles lately about “Big Data” and the looming “talent gap.” This article from the Wall Street Journal is a good example. It cites a McKinsey estimate that states that we will need 1.5 million more managers and analysts who are ... [Read more...]

Ricky Ho has created a reference a 6-page PDF reference card on Big Data Machine Learning, with examples implemented in the R language. (A free registration to DZone Refcardz is required to download the PDF.) The examples cover: Predictive modeling overview (how to set up test and training sets in ... [Read more...]

What's the one thing we need to do?Marketing researchers are asked this question frequently whenever they analyze customer satisfaction data.  A company wishing to increase sales or limit churn wants to focus only on the most important determinants of those outcomes.   Given the limitations imposed by the available customer ... [Read more...]

This week we have a guest blog post by Neil Kelley Last week, I stumbled on Vijay’s blog post demonstrating his new package rvertnet. Although I am a paleontologist, some of my research involves anatomical comparison between extinct species and extant relatives or ecological analogs, so I have some ... [Read more...]

I’ve been interviewed twice in the last year: For DecisionStats, 9 August 2012. For Data Mining Research, 21 October 2011. Republished in Amstat News, 1 December 2011. Some readers of this blog might find them interesting. I said a few things in t... [Read more...]

I remember when I started with R, there was little processing power directed toward an IDE. I had enough problems with the syntax, loops and the like and R gui seemed adequate. When I started working on a heavy project, I had to knock it up a notch (bam!). After ... [Read more...]

A few days ago, I wrote a piece on finding the minimum expected shortfall portfolio.  A few astute commenters quickly picked up where I was going with this -- using this as an alternative to low/minimum volatility portfolios.  What follo... [Read more...]

A new bug-fix release of the RcppBDT package appeared on CRAN earlier today. David Reiner noticed that the functions getEndOfMonth and getEndOfBizWeek were not working right. These are convenience wrappers around the real functionality provided as a ... [Read more...]

While most R packages on CRAN are designed to be used by an R user directly, a few packages are designed to be used by other package developers. (And some packages are so useful that they're regularly used by both camps.) When a package author publishes a package to CRAN, ... [Read more...]

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The ff package is a great and efficient way of working with large datasets.  One of the main reasons why I prefer to use it above other packages that allow working with large datasets is that it is a complete set of tools. When comparing it to the other open ... [Read more...]

I am currently designing my RStudio - Dropbox - Mardown/Knitter/Wordpress - Github workflow. One problem is that working on multiple machines with different version of Windows means I somehow need to tell R where my Dropbox folder is located.I used to ... [Read more...]