the annual march cps-asec has been supplying the statistics for the census bureau's report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage since 1948.  wow.  the us census bureau and the bureau of labor statistics (bls) tag-team on this one... [Read more...]

Data Scientist Drew Conway tackles the problem of deciding which programming languages are the most popular in an interesting way: by comparing the number of projects tagged in GitHub with each language, and the number of questions in StackOverflow about the language. The former is a measure of how often ... [Read more...]

The gridSVG package exports grid images to an SVG format for viewing on the web. This article describes new features in gridSVG that allow grid coordinate system information to be exported along with the image. This allows the SVG image … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I use the Open Source photo management Software Digikam (along with other tools such as Gimp and DarkTable).  I obviously need very little encouragement to combine my geeky hobbies, so I quickly tried to interrogate Digikam with R, which is easy, ... [Read more...]

The orientation of terrain surface (aspect) can have dramatic effects on landscape-scale variation in soil temperature and moisture. Summarizing aspect angle is complicated by the fact that sampled values are measured on a circular scale. The circular ... [Read more...]

I don’t really care for the name “marimekko” or “mosaic,” but I do like this type of plot as a means of illustrating proportions in nested categorical data, or as an alternative to the parallel time series plots discussed... [Read more...]

Which sectors are coherent, and which aren’t? Previously The post “S&P 500 correlations up to date” looked at rolling mean correlations among stocks.  In particular it looked at rolling mean correlations of stocks within sectors. Of importance to this post is that the sectors used are taken from Wikipedia. ... [Read more...]

The third Cologne R user meeting took place last Friday, 5 October 2012, at the Institute of Sociology. The evening was sponsored by Revolution Analytics, who provided funding which went towards the Kölner R user group Meetup page. We had a good tur... [Read more...]

I need to simulate balanced and unbalanced phylogenetic trees for some research I am doing. In order to do this, I do rejection sampling: simulate a tree -__ measure tree shape -__ reject if not balanced or unbalanced enough. But what is enough? We ne... [Read more...]

When visualizing an array of data in a heatmap, a good color map makes a world of difference.Thanks to my work in 'omics (i.e. transcriptomics - microarrays and RNASeq) I've looked at a lot of heatmaps over the past couple of years, and generated quite... [Read more...]

I saw this post and I decided to replicated that good example but with data closer to me, particulary data of my country. So, I've got the shape data of the capital of my country (You can download the data from here). The data comes from the 2002 CENSO... [Read more...]

I want to address comments that were asked in my last post, Permanent Portfolio – Simple Tools, about Permanent Portfolio strategy. Specifically: The impact of transaction costs on the perfromance and Create a modified version of risk allocation portfolio that distributes weights across 3 asset classes: stocks(SPY), gold(GLD), and treasuries(... [Read more...]

Thanks to Anthony Damico who alerted me to an error in the Bank of America's 1% cash rewards figure in my last post. The plot shows the true reward percentage as a function of purchase amount. A key "feature" of the BoA reward program is that the full 1% is only awarded ... [Read more...]

Ever since the end of the Mexican Revolution and the Cristero War violence in Mexico inched down in fits and starts from a high of about 60 homicides per 100,000 people to its lowest level sometime during the middle of the last decade (there's some uncertainty about the number of homicides in 2007). ... [Read more...]

Here at Revolution Analytics, we're proud to have been a part of fostering local user groups for R users around the world. Last year we sponsored more than 40 groups, with representation from every continent around the world. And we're thrilled to see the continued growth in user groups: this time ... [Read more...]

Quick Note: I had an error recently where RStudio nor EGit nor the command line would push my repo to github.  I can't remember the exact error, although after some googling I found this SO answer that solved it git config http.postBuffer 52428800... [Read more...]

It’s often the case that I want to write an R script that loops over multiple datasets, or different subsets of a large dataset, running the same procedure over them: generating plots, or fitting a model, perhaps. I set the script running and turn to another task, only to ... [Read more...]

Did you find this post useful?  Does your organization need Oracle services?  We can help.   Much of this morning went into investigating strange ADDM reports on a two-node Oracle RAC database.  For some reason, there were statistically improbable differences…Read more › [Read more...]

Here’s an example of how to color your plot shapes and pch using an ifelse() statement. Ifelse() is handy as it creates an easy way to branch a function. The syntax is: ifelse(logical.condition, option1, option2). Meaning, if the logical condi... [Read more...]

IntroductionYou know what's awesome? Pocket.I mean, sure, it's not the first. I think Instapaper existed a little before (perhaps). And there are alternatives, like Google Reader. But Pocket is still my favorite. It's pretty awesome at what it does.Pocket (or Read It Later, as it used to be ... [Read more...]