# Monthly Archives: December 2012

## UEFA Champions League Knockout Phase Draws: Monte Carlo Simulation with R

December 7, 2012
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Draws for the knockout phase of the 2012–13 UEFA Champions League will be held in Nyon on the 20th December 2012. The rules of the draw are simple and are as follows:8 Group winner teams will be seeded.8 Group runner-up teams will be unseeded.Teams coming from the same group and from same association...

## Dot-density maps with spsample()

December 7, 2012
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Today’s example is a little odd, in that the code isn’t pretty and the example isn’t really something you’d actually produce in real life — but if you’ll overlook those oddities, you’ll find that the spsample(...

## Visualizing Baltimore with R and ggplot2: Crime Data

December 7, 2012
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The advent of municipal open data initiatives has been both a blessing and curse for my particular brand of data nerd. On one hand, it has opened up the possibility of developing deep and useful knowledge about the places we...

## How to spend an inordinate amount of time becoming efficient

December 6, 2012
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I’ve spent a good deal of 2012 constructing a data warehouse to manage all the various data elements that my company has. Although we’re a small enterprise, the richness and complexity of the information is rather high. Moreover, as a data-driven organization, there’s a strong impetus to construct meaningful analysis with every bit of input

## R in the Cloud

December 6, 2012
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I've been having some great fun parallelizing R code on Amazon's cloud. Now that things are chugging away nicely, it's time to document my foibles so I can remember not to fall into the same pits of despair again. The goal was to perform lots of trails of a randomized statistical simulation. The jobs were independent and fairly chunky, taking...

## Importing Data Into R from Different Sources

December 6, 2012
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I have found that I get data from many different sources.  These sources range from simple .csv files to more complex relational databases, to structure XML or JSON files.  I have compiled the different approaches that one can use to easily access these datasets. Local Column Delimited Files This is probably the most common and

## Tibshirani’s original paper on the lasso. Breiman’s…

December 6, 2012
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$\large \dpi{200} \bg_white \sqrt{\blacksquare^2 + \blacksquare^2 + \blacksquare^2 + \blacksquare^2 + \blacksquare^2 + \blacksquare^2 + \ldots }$

Tibshirani’s original paper on the lasso. Breiman’s Garotte — 1993 Tibshirani lasso paper submitted — 1994 Tibshirani lasso paper revised — 1995 Tibshirani lasso paper accepted — 1996 This is one of those papers that I’m so excited about, I feel like “You should just read the whole thing! It’s all good!” But I realise that’s less than reasonable. Here is a bit of summary,...

## ggplot2 0.9.3 and plyr 1.8 have been released!

December 6, 2012
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We’re pleased to announce new versions of ggplot2 (0.9.3) and plyr (1.8).  To get up and running with the new versions, start a clean R session without ggplot2 or plyr loaded, and run install.packages(c("ggplot2", "gtable", "scales", "plyr")). Read on to find out what’s new. ggplot2 0.9.3 Most of the changes version 0.9.3 are bug fixes. Perhaps

## Link to Item Response Theory Presentations Using R

December 6, 2012
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After my post on item response theory,  a number of you have asked for links to applications that provide R code.  As I noted in that post, a good deal of work is being done in an area of research called patient-related outcome measurement (P...

## To reject random walk in climate

December 6, 2012
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I read the post The surprisingly weak case for global warming and the rejection; Climate: Misspecified. Based on the first, I wanted to make a post, just to write I agree with the second.The post features a number of plots like thisFor m...