Welcome to the re-designed, re-hosted and re-platformed Simply Statistics blog. We have moved the blog over to the WordPress platform to give us some newer features that were lacking over at tumblr. So far the transition has gone okay but … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Last night this article by Chris Drummond of the Canadian National Research Council (Conseil national de recherches Canada) popped up in my Google Scholar alert. The title of the article, “Reproducible Research: a Dissenting Opinion” would seem to indicate that he disagrees … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Two weeks ago I finished teaching my course Computing for Data Analysis through Coursera. Since then I’ve had some time to think about how it went, what I learned, and what I’d do differently. First off, let me say that it was a lot of fun.... [Read more...]

As the entire East Coast gets soaked by Hurricane Sandy, I can’t help but think that this is the perfect time to…take a course online! Well, as long as you have electricity, that is. I live in a heavily tree-lined area and so it’s onl... [Read more...]

I noticed in the development version of R the following note in the NEWS file: There is a subtle change in behaviour for numeric index values 2^31 and larger.  These used never to be legitimate and so were treated as NA, sometimes with a warning. [Read more...]

Computing for Data Analysis Data Analysis Mathematical Biostatistics Bootcamp [Read more...]

One factor that is critical for any financial planning is estimating what future inflation will be. For example, if you’re saving money in an instrument that gains 3% per year, and inflation is estimated to be 4% per year, well then you’re losing m... [Read more...]

Here’s a bit of R code for scraping the BejingAir Twitter feed and plotting the hourly PM2.5 values for the past 24 hours. The script defaults to the past 24 hours but you can modify that by simply changing the value for the variable ‘n’.  You c... [Read more...]

One of the nice things about tracking the R subversion repository using git instead of subversion is you can do git shortlog -s -n which gives you 19855 ripley 6302 maechler 5299 hornik 2263 pd 1153 murdoch 813 iacus 716 luke 6... [Read more...]

New O'Reilly book on parallel R computation: Looks like it covers snow, multicore, parallel (package), and some others. Anyone know anything more about this book? [Read more...]

My article on computing on the language was unexpectedly popular and so I wanted to quickly follow up on my own solution. Many of you got the answer, and in fact many got solutions that were quite a bit shorter than mine. Here’s how I did it: makeList [Read more...]

And now for something a bit more esoteric…. I recently wrote a function to deal with a strange problem. Writing the function ended up being a fun challenge related to computing on the R language itself. Here’s the problem: Write a function that tak... [Read more...]

One of my favorite R packages that I use all the time is the RColorBrewer package. The package has been around for a while now and is written/maintained by Erich Neuwirth. The guts of the package are based on Cynthia Brewer’s very cool work on the us... [Read more...]

 One question I get a lot about how to read large data frames into R. There are some useful tricks that can save you both time and memory when reading large data frames but I find that many people are not aware of them. Of course, your ability to read... [Read more...]

I am going to start a continuing “R Workshop” series of posts with R tips and tricks. If you have questions you’d like answered or were wondering about certain aspects, please leave them in the comments. [Read more...]