R will overtake SAS and SPSS in 2015 - according to David Smith in his post on the Revolutions blog.
I can believe that!
© 2012, David E. Giles
Blog Archives
R Videos – and More
Some of us learn easily from the written word, but for most of us some visualization speeds up the process and generally helps with retention as well.
With that in mind I was delighted to see this nice list of free videos that demonstrate the use of R, posted on Ethan Fosse's blog, "Culture, Statistics, and...
A Bayesian Consumption Function
What the title of this post is supposed to mean is: "Estimating a simple aggregate consumption function using Bayesian regression analysis".
In a recent post I mentioned my long-standing interest in Bayesian Econometrics. When I teach this material I usually include a simple application that involves estimating a consumption function using U.S. time-series data. I used to have...
LeaRning R
If, like me, you're still an R novice, you'll no doubt find this post on Pairach Piboonrungroj's blog extremely helpful. Among other things, Pairach provides links to 20 40 "R tutorials". It's a really nice resource!
© 2012, David E. Giles
Drop-Down Menus for R
A few days ago, Andrew Barr had a great post on his blog. It was titled, "R is not just for nerds....it has drop-down menus!" You can bet that this one caught my eye when it was re-posted on R-Bloggers.
Briefly, Andrew takes us through the installation and basic use of the Java Gui for R (JGR) in...
The Popularity of Statistical Packages
No matter what your favourite statistical package is, you'll find this post by Robert Muenchen highly informative.
Robert concludes that:
"By most of the measures discussed here, R is competing well with the commercial software vendors. However, I advise not over generalizing from this data. SAS and SPSS continue to dominate the corporate world and Stata is doing quite...
Influential People in the "Big Data" Field
Yesterday, Haydn Shaughnnessy wrote a piece for Forbes titled, Who are the Top 20 Influencers in Big Data?
Fans of R will be delighted to see David Smith of Revolution Analytics up there at number 2!
Congratulations!
© 2012, David E. Giles
New Year Resolutions
Well, here we go again! It's time of year that we make all of those resolutions - the ones that usually get broken before the holiday decorations have been packed away. Not this year, though!
In 2012, and in no particular order, I firmly resolve to:
- Increase my use of the R statistical environment in my research and teaching, and foster "Reconometrics".
- Become more...
BIG Data
"Big Data" = data that come in amounts that are too large for current computer hardware and software to deal with. That sounds like fun!
Norman Nie developed the well known SPSS statistical package in the 1960, and is currently President and CEO of Revolution Analytics, a California company that promotes the use of the R computing...
Just Crantastic!
If you're an econometrician and you don't use the R software environment - for at least some of your work, then you're missing out on all sorts of (free!) opportunities.
Yes, it can be a steep learning curve, but it's worth every drop of sweat, and there are some great R community sites that will help you along...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
