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We introduced Rcpp 0.10.0 with a number of very nice new features a few days ago, and the activity on the rcpp-devel mailing list has been pretty responsive which is awesome. But because few things beat a nice example, this post tries to build some more excitement. We will illustrate how ... [Read more...]

I'm really looking forward to useR! 2013 (the international conference for R users), and not just because it's being held in Spain next year (July 10-12). The program is already coming together, with a great lineup of invited speakers, including R-core member Duncan Murdoch and prolific package authoR Hadley Wickham. You ... [Read more...]

I spotted on R-bloggers a post discussing optimising the efficiency of programming accept-reject algorithms. While it is about SAS programming, and apparently supported by the SAS company, there are two interesting features with this discussion. The first one is about avoiding the dreaded loop in accept-reject algorithms. For instance, taking ... [Read more...]

After a four month simmer on various back burners and package conflicts, I’m pleased to announce that the successor to …Continue reading » [Read more...]

I gave this talk last night to the Melbourne Users of R Network. Examples [Read more...]

Last week we released version 0.1.5-4 of the ChainLadder package on CRAN. The R package provides methods which are typically used in insurance claims reserving. If you are new to R or insurance check out my recent talk on Using R in Insurance.The chain-ladder method which is a popular ... [Read more...]

A commenter on my previous blog entry has drawn my attention to an R function called hetglm() that estimates heteroskedastic probit models. This function is contained in the glmx package. The glmx package is not available on CRAN yet, but thankfully can be downloaded here. The hetglm() function has a ... [Read more...]

Quite a lot of people have had fun recently with prime factorization. It all started on The Math Less Traveled, then various versions of the prime factorization diagrams appeared (here, here, this animated one, etc., they are actually more or less listed here). So I wanted to have fun too ... [Read more...]

It’s a lovely day. I took a walk around the campus after lunch. The scene was enjoyable in one deep autumn day. Before the afternoon work, I’d like to spend a few moments on the 24th Euler Problem. A permutation is an ordered arrangement of … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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This past Saturday I led a data dive workshop for the Dallas R Users Group using Lahman’s baseball statistics. After providing a brief introduction to the Lahman R package and showing how to load the data and make some basic plots,... [Read more...]

In this post, I made an SEM model and showed the results in a table.It’s a great feature of SEM that you can sketch your ideas about how the world works, and being able to get such a sketch back out of OpenMx is very helpful.Importantly, a ... [Read more...]

I’ve been hunting for a lightweight CSV editor for OSX so I could to make fixes to data files and not need to fire up Excel. While you can edit a CSV file in any text editor, it’s a pain to navigate the files without a spreadsheet-like interface. ... [Read more...]

Some time ago I stumbled upon a problem connected with the labels of a clustering. The partition an instance belongs to, is mostly labeled through an integer ranging from 1 to K, where k is the number of clusters. The task at that time was to plot a map of the ... [Read more...]

Registration is now open for BIWA Summit 2013.  This event, focused on Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Analytics, is hosted by the BIWA SIG of the IOUG on January 9 and 10 at the Hotel Sofitel, near Oracle he... [Read more...]

Coursera's introductory "Statistics One" course uses R for the practical data analysus exercises. To support course participants, Princeton University grad student Laura Suttle created a series of web videos introducing the R interface. These videos are available to the public, and are a great place for anyone new to R ... [Read more...]

IntroductionSo a little while ago I quit my job.Well, actually, that sounds really negative. I'm told that when you are discussing large changes in your life, like finding a new career, relationship, or brand of diet soda, it's important to frame things positively.So let me rephrase that - ... [Read more...]

The function apply() is certainly one of the most useful function. I was scared of it during a while and refused to use it. But it makes the code so much faster to write and so efficient that we can't afford not using it. If you are like me, that ... [Read more...]

Please contact me if you’d like to take over maintainership of this popular R package. [Read more...]