If, when writing code for a function, up to the current point in the code distinct local variables have been accessed for reading times (), will the next read access be from a previously unread local variable and if not what is the likelihood of choosing each of the distinct variables (global variables are ignored
Identifying project stakeholders and their requirements is a very important factor in the success of any project. Existing techniques tend to be very ad-hoc. In her PhD thesis Soo Ling Lim came up with a very interesting solution using social network analysis and what is more made her raw data available for download I have
I was one of the 170 or so people at the Data Science hackathon in London over the weekend. As always this was well run by Carlos and his team who kept us fed, watered and connected to the Internet. One of the three challenges involved a dataset containing pairs of Twitter users, A and
One thing I have noticed when reading other peoples’ R code is that their functions are often a lot longer than mine. Writing overly long functions is a common novice programmer mistake, but the code I am reading does not look like it is written by novices (based on the wide variety of base functions
Writing a program in R is almost bureaucracy free: variables don’t need to be declared, the language does a reasonable job of guessing the type a value might need to be automatically be converted to, there is no need to create a function having a special name that gets called at program startup, the commonly
Since my post questioning whether native R usage exists (e.g., a common set of R coding patterns) several people have asked about coding/style guidelines for R. My approach to style/coding guidelines is economic, adhering to a guideline involves paying a cost now for some future benefit. Obviously to be worthwhile the benefit must be greater
Note to R users: Users of other languages enjoy spending lots of time discussing the minutiae of the language they use, something R users don’t appear to do; perhaps you spend your minutiae time on statistics which I don’t yet know well enough to spot when it occurs). There follows a minutiae post that may
When learning a new language I try to make an effort to write it like a native developer. R has one language feature that has been severely testing my desire to write like a native and this afternoon I realized that most of the people reading my code will also experience the same jarring sensation
Computers break down every now and again and this is a serious problem when an application needs runs on thousands of individual computers (nodes) plugged together; lots more hardware creates lots more opportunity for a failure that renders any subsequent calculations by working nodes possible wrong. The solution is checkpointing; saving the state of each
Developers are constantly being told that it is worth making the effort when writing code to make it maintainable (whatever that might be). Looking at this effort as an investment what kind of return has to be achieved to make it worthwhile? Short answer: The percentage saving during maintenance has to be twice as great
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
