For some cryptic reason I needed a function that calculates function values on sliding windows of a vector. Googling around soon brought me to ‘rollapply’, which when I tested it seems to be a very versatile function. However, I wanted to code my own version just for vector purposes in the hope that it may 
As I am working with large gene expression matrices (microarray data) in my job, it is sometimes important to look at the correlation in gene expression of different genes. It has been shown that by calculating the Pearson correlation between genes, one can identify (by high values, i.e. > 0.9) genes that share a common 
I have been working with R for some time now, but once in a while, basic functions catch my eye that I was not aware of… For some project I wanted to transform a correlation matrix into a covariance matrix. Now, since cor2cov does not exist, I thought about “reversing” the cov2cor function (stats:::cov2cor). Inside 
Dear R-Users, a question: I am the author of the ‘qpcR’ package. Within this, there is a function ‘propagate’ that does error propagation based on Monte Carlo Simulation, permutation-based confidence intervals and Taylor expansion. For the latter I recently implemented a second-order Taylor expansion term that can correct for nonlinearity. The formulas are quite complex 
Standard nonlinear regression assumes homoscedastic data, that is, all response values are distributed normally. In case of heteroscedastic data (i.e. when the variance is dependent on the magnitude of the data), weighting the fit is essential. In nls (or nlsLM of the minpack.lm package), weighting can be conducted by two different methods: 1) by supplying 
Those that do a lot of nonlinear regression will love the nls function of R. In most of the cases it works really well, but there are some mishaps that can occur when using bad starting values for the parameters. One of the most dreaded is the “singular gradient matrix at initial parameter estimates” which 
For me, one of the most annoying features of R is that by default, rbind, cbind and data.frame recycle the shorter vector to the length of the longer vector. I still don’t understand why the standard generics don’t have a parameter like cbind(1:10, 1:5, fill = TRUE) to fill up with ‘NA’s. There may be 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
