Computers break down every now and again and this is a serious problem when an application needs runs on thousands of individual computers (nodes) plugged together; lots more hardware creates lots more opportunity for a failure that renders any subsequent calculations by working nodes possible wrong. The solution is checkpointing; saving the state of each
This is probably the coolest-looking thing I’ve figured out how to do with raster images in R. Similar to (although not quite as impressive as) these images by Jeff Clark, I alter the simple k-means approach described in the previous post to...
A common scenario that I run into is time and how to deal with it. I often will do a variety of summaries and analysis that need to be measured at different points in time. Whether I want to graph the data or review the results I need to be able to perform measurements relative
Having spent a chink of the weekend and a piece of yesterday trying to pull NHS Winter sitrep data into some sort of shape in Scraperwiki, (described, in part, here: When Machine Readable Data Still Causes “Issues” – Wrangling Dates…), I couldn’t but help myself last night and had a quick go at using RStudio’s 
Most statisticians know that pie charts are a terrible way to plot percentages. You can find explanations here, here, and here as well as the R help file for the pie function which states: Pie charts are a very bad … Continue reading →
Ajay Ohri, author of R for Business Analytics, was recently interviewed about using R instead of Excel for human resources management. Human Resources is an increasingly analytics-driven field, with predictive modeling now used to prioritize applicants for interview and to organize workspaces, to give just two examples. As Ajay points out, R gets over the limitations of spreadsheets: There...
A the new Rcpp release 0.10.1 arrived this morning on CRAN (as already has Windows binaries) and in Debian. This is a follow-up to the recent 0.10.0 release which extends the exciting new Rcpp-attributes and Rcpp-sugar work further, and as in a n...
Richard Everitt tweetted yesterday about a recent publication in JCGS by Rajib Paul, Steve MacEachern and Mark Berliner on convergence assessment via stratification. (The paper is free-access.) Since this is another clear interest of mine’s, I had a look at the paper in the train to Besançon. (And wrote this post as a result.) The 
I have published the first version of the code and main figures of the “Spatial Data” chapter of the forthcoming …
The other day I stumbled accross an amazing PMML model API called jpmml. It's written in Java and supports PMML 4.1 (and older). Neural networks, random forests, regression and trees PMML models can be consumed and used for scoring.I decide...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
