# Monthly Archives: January 2013

## Efficiency in Joining Two Data Frames

January 28, 2013
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In R, there are multiple ways to merge 2 data frames. However, there could be a huge disparity in terms of efficiency. Therefore, it is worthwhile to test the performance among different methods and choose the correct approach in the real-world work. For smaller data frames with 1,000 rows, all six methods shown below seem

## Chances of making an NFL field goal

January 28, 2013
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If the scores are tied in this weekend's Super Bowl and the game rests on the outcome of a field goal attempt, the chart below will tell you the chances of the goal being made. All you need to know is the distance of the kick: What this says that if the kick is longer than 50 yards, there's...

## How slow is R really?

January 28, 2013
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One thing you always hear about R is how slow it is, especially when the code is not well vectorized or includes loops. But R is an interpreted language and its strong suit really isn't speed but rather the comparative advantage is the 4,284 packages o...

January 28, 2013
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We looked at NFL punts before on Decision Science News. That's old news. Field goals are the new hotness, and Super Bowl Sunday is coming up, so let's look at a kicker's chances. We've taken the same data set and looked at a kicker's chances of getting the ball through the uprights depending on the yard line the kick is...

## Using R: writing a table with odd lines (GFF track headers)

January 28, 2013
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The other day, I wanted to add track lines to a GFF file, so that I could view different features as separate custom tracks in a genome browser. The need to shuffle genome coordinates between different file formats seems to occur all the time when you deal with some kind of bioinformatic data. It’s usually

## Applying Tradeblotter’s Nice Work Across Manager Rather than Time

January 28, 2013
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Ever since I saw the very helpful distribution page first presented in Download and parse EDHEC hedge fund indexes, I have used it liberally.  Now that it is has been functionalized (Visually Comparing Return Distributions), I thought I would amen...

## Getting Started with F1 Betting Data

January 28, 2013
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As part of my “learn about Formula One Stats” journey, one of the things I wanted to explore was how F1 betting odds change over the course of a race weekend, along with how well they predict race weekend outcomes. Courtesy of @flutterF1, I managed to get a peek of some betting data from one

## The "golden age" of a football player

January 28, 2013
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It's been some time since my last post on football. And we're talking about european soccer here. So I finally managed to write some functions which allow me to extract player stats from www.transfermarkt.de. The site tracks lots of stats in the world of soccer. For each player, there is information about the dominant foot, height, age, the estimated...

## The law of small numbers

January 28, 2013
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In insurance, the law of large numbers (named loi des grands nombres initially by Siméon Poisson, see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/…) is usually mentioned to legitimate large portfolios, because of pooling and diversification: the larger the pool, the more ‘predictable’ the losses will be (in a given period). Of course, under standard statistical assumption, namely finite expected value, and independence (see http://freakonometrics.blog.free.fr/…....