A new minor / maintenance release RQuantLib 0.3.11 is now on CRAN and in Debian. Like the RcppClassic upload two days ago and the RcppZiggurat and RcppEigen uploads yesterday, this release was motivated at least in part by an upcoming Rcpp releas... [Read more...]

"R has had a revolutionary effect on the way statistics are communicated." So says John Chambers: one of the members of the R-core team overseeing R; and co-inventor of the S language. In this interview with Trevor Hastie (his co-author on Statistical Models in S), John Chambers recounts his involvement ... [Read more...]

For R beginners, the first operator they use is probably the assignment operator [Read more...]

I liked this chart a lot. #Dailychart: Argentina's plunging peso is not alone: http://t.co/CWnaNLcm4T pic.twitter.com/4Nr6EgRGx9— The Economist (@ECONdailycharts) January 27, 2014 I thought I would show how we can semi-replicate it in R with rCharts.  Here it is with the currencies that are on ... [Read more...]

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My short paper on this came out on Friday in the British Medical Journal. The aim is to help both authors and readers of research make sense of this rather confusing but unavoidable statistic, the odds ratio (OR). The fundamental … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Earlier this week I read this article about “Why Publishing Everything Is More Effective than Selective Publishing of Statistically Significant Results” by Mercal et al (2014). The authors simulated different meta-analytic scenarios and came to the conclusion that publishing everything is more effective for the scientific collective. This got me thinking ... [Read more...]

A number of the APIs we interact with (e.g., PLOS full text API, and USGS's BISON API in rplos and rbison, respectively) expose Solr endpoints. Solr is an Apache hosted project - it is a powerful search server. Given that at least two, and possibly more in the future, ... [Read more...]

Last week, version 5.0 of the forecast package for R was released. There are a few new functions and changes made to the package, which is why I increased the version number to 5.0. Thanks to Earo Wang for helping with this new version. Handling missing values and outliers Data cleaning is ... [Read more...]

pingr is an R package that contains one function, ping(), with one purpose: To go ping on whatever platform you are on (thanks to the audio package). It is intended to be useful, for example, if you are running a long analysis in the background and want to know when ... [Read more...]

A new maintenance release of RcppZiggurat is now on CRAN. And just like yesterday's RcppClassic upload, this is motivated chiefly by some minor caretaking for an upcoming Rcpp release -- hopefully soon, and with more details to follow. This release... [Read more...]

Recently, I came across this interesting blog post http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2013/12/k-means-clustering-86-single-malt-scotch-whiskies.html by the Revolutions blog poster Luba Gloukhov. This post initially caught my attention because of the originality of the dataset: 86 scottish whiskeys marked on a scale of 0-4 in 12 different taste profile (source data is ... [Read more...]

I often get questions what is the use of parscale parameter in optim procedure in GNU R. Therefore I have decided to write a simple example showing its usage and importance. The function I test is a simplified version of estimation problem I had to sol... [Read more...]

There were quite some reactions on lasts week's post converting plots to data. Two additional programs were mentioned; WebPlotDigitzier and DataThief. Note that google or wikipedia has a bunch of alternatives. Datathief is shareware, a java program, so... [Read more...]

Imputation is predictive inference and not causal inference! I have met many people, who consider the two are equivalent. Their reasoning is based on the belief that if you can produce a model which replicate the data generating mechanism, it will give you the best prediction. Which may or may ... [Read more...]

I've done a dreadful job of reading The Theory That Would Not Die, but several weeks ago I somehow managed to read the appendix. Here the author gives a short explanation of Bayes' theorem using statistics related to breast cancer and mammogram results. This is the same real world example (... [Read more...]

A maintenance release of RcppClassic, now at version 0.9.5, went out to CRAN today. Nothing changed in user-facing code. The build was triggered by a change in an upcoming Rcpp release (more about that another time), and a few minor updates were nee... [Read more...]

It is quite easy to get started with R. The very first step is to download R from the official website , and install it. I suggest that you install both 32-bit and 64-bit versions for greater compatibility if you are running a 64-bit operating system. For typical statistical programming, if ... [Read more...]

After noticing some frustrating inaccuracies with the high-resolution world coastlines and national boundaries database found in worldHires from the package mapdata (based on CIA World Data Bank II data), I decided to look into other options. Although listed as "depreciated", the data found in NOAAs online "Coastline Extractor" is a ... [Read more...]

As with any programming language, R allows you to tackle the same problem in many different ways or styles. These styles differ both in the amount of code, readability, and speed. In this post I want to illustrate this by… See more › [Read more...]