Over at Cerebral Mastication, JD Long tells a characteristically entertaining and informative story about how he uses R to run stochastic simulations of insurance portfolios and reinsurance treaties. A typical job involves 10,000 simulations, and when each estimate takes over 20 seconds you're talking some serious time to get the job done. Fortunately, this is the kind of problem...
Blog Archives
Frank Harrell to teach Regression Modeling Strategies short course
If you're using regression models but want really hone your regression-fu this short course on Regression Modeling Strategies by Frank Harrell looks really interesting. Frank is the author of the book Regression Modeling Strategies which is my go-to reference whenever I'm doing regression of any kind in R, so it's definitely worth a trip to Nashville to if you...
Package Update Roundup: Dec 2009 – Jan 2010
A special double edition of the Package Update Roundup this month! This is a list of new or updated packages that were released for R in December and January, as announced on the r-packages mailing list. To include other updates on this list, please email David Smith. For a complete list of all updates on CRAN, see the CRANberries...
Registration open for R/Finance 2010
Registrations are now open for the R/Finance 2010 conference, to be help April 16-17 in Chicago. Last year's meeting was a great success, and this year's looks to be just as good, with some great keynotes lined up: Analysis of Integrated and Co-integrated Time Series with R (Bernhard Pfaff) Leverage Space Portfolio Model (Ralph Vince) Signal Extraction (Marc Wildi0...
Because it’s Friday: Evolution in song
With thanks to my favourite science blog Bad Astronomy, the late great Carl Sagan sings again, this time on the topic of evolution. He's joined by autotuned Richard David Attenborough and Jane Goodall. Great stuff. Bad Astronomy: The Unbroken Thread
Mapping the Massachusetts election upset with R, ctd
Last week we looked at an analysis done in R by the good folks at Offensive Politics, looking at the political climate surrounding the recent Senate election in Massachusetts. There were some very insightful comments (thanks, Revolutions readers!) about the design of the charts, especially in the choice of color schemes used (the originals didn't use a neutral white...
Advanced graphics in R
A lot of attention recently has gone to the more modern (and, dare I say, sexier) graphics systems in R, ggplot2 and lattice. But there's a lot of power in the base graphics system built into core R, especially when you want control over every aspect of how the graph is laid out. Ryan Rosario has put together some...
In case you missed it: January roundup
In case you missed them, here are some articles from last month of particular interest to R users. This post linked to slides and video from a 30-minute "Introduction to R" talk I gave on January 28, with links to many useful R resources. This post brought news that R's creators Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka have jointly won...
Survey: Share your thoughts about predictive models with Aberdeen Group
Analyst firm Aberdeen Group is conducting research into the use of predictive models in business with a 10-minute survey. It's focused mainly on businesses that are using (or plan to use) predictive models to forecast aspects of their business and the systems they have in place (or plan to put in place) to do so. If you're using predictive...
InfoWorld: SAS and SPSS rise to R opportunity
At InfoWorld's "Open Source" blog Salvio Rodrigues found R co-inventor Robert Gentleman's appointment to the REvolution Computing board "a great impetus for me to look at R again". He notes that both SAS and SPSS have recognized the opportunity presented by R: I suspect that SPSS and SAS made their individual decisions based on three factors. First, they likely...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
