I’ve just released my first R package! Over the past 1.5 years or so, I’ve been studying an obscure statistical model over ranking (full, or partial) data called Mallows’ model. It hypothesizes that a set of sequence data has a “modal” sequence about which the data cluster, and that the data fall away from that 
I came across Dr. Peter Norvig’s blog about writing a basic spell-checker (http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html), and just had to try to implement it in R. Please excuse the ugly-ish code (I have not optimized it or commented it adequately at this point, but you can get the idea of what it does by reading Dr. Norvig’s blog). 
My last post discussed a method to decode a substitution cipher using a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. It was brought to my attention that this code could be improved by using Simulated Annealing methods to jump around the sample space and avoid some of the local maxima. Here is a basic description of the difference: In a 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
