Like Rob, I recently got back from ICOTS. What a great conference. Kudos to everyone who worked hard to organize and pull it off. In one of the sessions I was at, Amelia McNamara (@AmeliaMN) gave a nice presentation about how … Continue reading → [Read more...]

As global warming causes sea levels to rise, the risk of flooding for coastal settlements also rises over time. A recent analysis by Reuters find that incidents of coastal flooding along the Eastern seaboard of the United States have surged in recent years as the sea level steadily rises. Flood ... [Read more...]

Analyses as Packages TL;DR Instead of writing an analysis as a single or set of R scripts, use a package and include the analysis as a vignette of the package. Read below for the why, the how is in the next post. Analyses and Reports As data science or ... [Read more...]

Usually in strongly typed languages, like C++, the type of a variable comes before the variable, e.g.: int x = 23 ; So x is declared of type int and assignd the value 23. Now, some languages do things differently, e.g. in julia: x::Int8 = 10... [Read more...]

Yesterday evening, I uploaded a graph, with the labor productivity as a function of coffee consumption. Of course, it was for fun ! With this kind of regression, base on aggregated data, we can say almost anything, since most of them are correlated because of some (hidden) common factor, such as ... [Read more...]

In this post, I will focus on the analysis of available R packages and the behavior of its users. In essence, this involves looking at the data in two different ways (1) relationships among available R packages in CRAN and (2) tracking the behavior of R users through download logs on CRAN ... [Read more...]

Simulations can be useful in an unimaginably large number of scenarios. Finance in particular is a field of study where maths and statistics have made led to great advances (sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad). Value at Risk is just another example of subject where a simulation approach ... [Read more...]

On Twitter, I was asked if there were serious research papers published on coffee consumption and labour productivity. There are some papers on coffee breaks and productivity, e.g. Productivity Through Coffee Breaks, but I could not find anything on coffee consumptions. Since I could not find any dataset with ... [Read more...]

My research Fracking Growth investigates the localised impacts of the current oil and gas production boom in the US. The boom is triggered by extraction of oil and gas deposits, that were previously not possible to exploit. The shale deposits have become technologically recoverable due to a combination of horizontal ... [Read more...]

I am very excited about R at the moment.  Here is an example of an app I constructed for one of the long term monitoring projects at my full time place of employment.https://johnyagecic.shinyapps.io/BoatRunExplorer/ [Read more...]

Last week I looked at time effects of the shootingtracker database. This week I will look at the states. Some (smaller) states never made it on the database. Other states, far too frequently. The worst of these California. After correcting for populati... [Read more...]

I received a request overnight on how to render the Shepard’s classification diagram, which is an alternative to the USDA’s textural soil classification. This is quite simple to produce (albeit a little tedious), however, before I walk through the script, immediately below, please see the final result (which ... [Read more...]

Please before continue reading, make sure to read the disclaimer at the bottom of this article. Sometimes names of phenomena do not look like they suit the things they are attached to. In my opinion, that’s the case for stochastic processes.Stochastic process is a fancy word to describe ... [Read more...]

It has been a month since the UseR! 2014 conference, and I'm probably the last one who writes about it. UseR! is my favorite conference because it is technical and not too big. I have completely lost interest in big and broad conferences like JSM (to me, it has become Joint ... [Read more...]

While I was sitting in a conference room at UseR! 2014, I started counting the number of times that require() was used in the presentations, and would rant about it after I counted to ten. With drums rolling, David won this little award (sorry, I did not really mean this to ... [Read more...]

nothing is a package about nothing. The idea is that when you do require(nothing) you express that you don't need anything, and therefore nothing assumes you are fine just using the base package, so it detaches all other packages.

> loadedNamespaces()
 [1] "base"      "datasets"  "devtools"  "digest"    "evaluate"  "graphics"
 [7] "grDevices" "httr"      "memoise"   "methods"   "parallel"  "RCurl"
[13] "stats"     "stringr"   "tools"     "utils"     "whisker"
>
> require(nothing)
Loading required package: nothing  
unloading 'methods' package ...  
Failed with error:  ‘invalid 'pos' argument’  
>
> loadedNamespaces()
[1] "base"

I agree, this is completely useless. [Read more...]

I was honoured to be invited earlier this month to the Directions of Statistical Computing meeting in Brixen, Italy. DSC is one of two meetings run by the R Project and unlike the useR! conference, DSC is a much smaller and intimate meeting (DSC 2014 had about 30 participants). If you haven't ... [Read more...]

Annual R User Conference 2014The useR! 2014 conference was a mind-blowing experience. Hundreds of R enthusiasts and the beautiful UCLA campus, I am really glad that I had the chance to attend! The only problem is that, after a few days of non-stop R talks, I was (and still am) completely ... [Read more...]

(This article is adapted to the latest version of rvest package.) A large proportion of R's power should be attributed to the enormous amount of extension packages. Many packages are published to CRAN. These packages cover a wide range of fields. In this post, I'll show you how to use ... [Read more...]

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