We're pleased to announce the latest release of Oracle R Enterprise, now available for download. Oracle R Enterprise 1.3 features new predictive analytics interfaces for in-database model building and scoring, support for in-database sampling and partitioning techniques, and transparent support for Oracle DATE and TIMESTAMP data types to facilitate data preparation ... [Read more...]

This function helps prepare data for analysis with models that require polytomous items to be coded from 0 to N without missing categories, such as the Partial Credit Model (Masters, 1982). When there are no missing categories, an item that was suppos... [Read more...]

Recently I have been working with GNU R optimization routines a lot. Function optim has a nice trace option that allows to monitor optimization progress. Another standard function optimize has no such feature but it is pos... [Read more...]

Perhaps you have a file written in Markdown with embedded R of the kind that RStudio makes so nice and easy but you’d like a range of output formats to keep your collaborators happy.  Say latex, pdf, html and MS Word.  Here’s what you might do I shall ... [Read more...]

I was inspired by a few animated gifs that I saw recently so I decided to make one of my own. For this project, I sought out a way to effectively visualize how Mcdonald’s expanded throughout the world. To do this, I created a heatmap of the world and ... [Read more...]

Merry Christmas is.R() readers! Thanks for accompanying us through an excellent first semester of R blogging, and for your feedback and enthusiasm. To celebrate, we’ve built an image mosaic from the shiny, happy avatars of our over 600 (!) Twitter followers. Click for a beautiful mosaic! We’ll be back ... [Read more...]

The Wheel of Time is a series of books started by Robert Jordan. Unfortunately he died too early. Like all fans of the series I feel very lucky that Brandon Sanderson was able to continue these books. The first book Sanderson wrote was the Gathering St... [Read more...]

I recently read a really interesting blog post about trying to predict who survived on the Titanic with standard GLM models and two forms of non-parametric classification tree (CART) methodology. The post was featured on R-bloggers, and I think it's worth a closer look. The basic idea was to figure ... [Read more...]

Motivated by my young friend, HongMing Song, I managed to find more handy ways to calculate aggregated statistics by group in R. They require loading additional packages, plyr, doBy, Hmisc, and gdata, and are extremely user-friendly. In terms of CPU time, while the method with summarize() is as efficient as ... [Read more...]

Happy holidays!     Link to Gist [Read more...]

The is.R blog has been on a roll in December with their Advent CalendaR feature: daily tips about R to unwrap each day leading up to Christmas. If you haven't been following it, start with today's post and scroll down. Sadly there isn't a tag to collect all these ... [Read more...]

An explanation of quartiles, quintiles deciles, and boxplots. Previously “Again with variability of long-short decile tests” and its predecessor discusses using deciles but doesn’t say what they are. The *iles These are concepts that have to do with approximately equally sized groups created from sorted data. There are 4 groups ... [Read more...]

On an airplane the other day, I learned of a method called latent class (transition) analysis, and it sounded like an interesting thing to try in R. Of course, as with everything R, There is a Package for That, called poLCA, written by none other than Drew Linzer (of Votamatic ... [Read more...]

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A number of news outlets have reported a peculiar quirk that arose during Friday’s Champions League draw. Apparently, the sport’s European governing body, UEFA, ran a trial run the day before the main event, and the schedule chosen during this event was identical to that of the actual ... [Read more...]

Efficiency Comparison among 4 Methods above [Read more...]

End-of-year posts are corny but, what the heck, I think I can let myself delve in to corniness once a year. The following code gives a snapshot of what and how was R for me in 2012. outside.packages.2012 [Read more...]

Below is a piece of R snippet comparing the data import efficiencies among CSV, SQLITE, and HDF5. Similar to the case in Python posted yesterday, HDF5 shows the highest efficiency. [Read more...]

Now that I’m on my winter break, I’ve been taking a little bit of time to read up on some modelling techniques that I’ve never used before. Two such techniques are Random Forests and Conditional Trees.  Since both can be used … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Well, to be specific, I mean measuring district compactness (a very interesting subject, see these three articles for starters). There are myriad ways of measuring the “oddness” of a shape, including a comparison of the area of the district to its circumcircle, the moment of inertia of the shape, the ... [Read more...]