Articles by Tony

The Best Statistical Programming Language is …Javascript?

April 27, 2012 | Tony

R-Bloggers has recently been buzzing about Julia, the new kid on the statistical programming block. Julia, however, is hardly the sole contender for the market of R defectors, with Clojure-fork Incanter generating buzz as well. Even with these two making noise, I think there’s a huge point that everyone ... [Read more...]

Using wordcloud on search terms & phrases

March 28, 2012 | Tony

The wordcloud package for R is great, but all the examples I found used the tm package to process a large amount of textual data (web pages, text files, google docs, etc.)But what if you have normalized data where you have a word and its frequency? Or,... [Read more...]

Measuring the EIU Democracy Index (with Polity IV)

July 12, 2011 | Tony

Yet again, I have conjured up an (academically) unusual dataset on democracy! This time it’s the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, a weird little gem.  The dataset is the basis for a paper the Economist publishes every two years.  Because of this biannuality, there is data estimating the “... [Read more...]

Analyzing the Failed States Index (with Polity IV)

July 7, 2011 | Tony

So, I decided to sit down and have a little fun with that Failed States Index data I put together. To start, I expect that the dataset will be pretty linearly correlated with the polity IV data. This makes sense–true democracies aren’t failed states, and failed states tend ... [Read more...]

Using R for Stata to CSV Conversion

June 3, 2011 | Tony

I recently found myself in the unpleasant situation of needing to read a Stata .dta file, but not having Stata readily available to me. Normally, I’d fire up a text editor and deconstruct the file, except Stata saves its data in a proprietary Binary format, meaning it garbles some ... [Read more...]

Statistical Analysis with R, a Review

February 12, 2011 | Tony

[To all of the R-bloggers out there who recognize this, I apologize.  To those that don't, This is at least the 5th review of this book to go on the feed.  The author is linking to the others here.] Long Version: I have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science.  ... [Read more...]

Help! My model fits too well!

October 22, 2010 | Tony

This is sort-of related to my sidelined study of graph algebra. I was thinking about data I could apply a first-order linear difference model to, and the stock market came to mind. After all, despite some black swan sized shocks, what better predicts a day’s closing than the previous ...
[Read more...]

Dynamic Modeling 2: Our First Substantive Model

May 30, 2010 | Tony

(This is the second of a series of ongoing posts on using Graph Algebra in the Social Sciences.) First-order linear difference equations are powerful, yet simple modeling tools.  They can provide access to useful substantive insights to real-world phenomena.  They can have powerful predictive ability when used appropriately.  Additionally, they ... [Read more...]

Dynamic Modeling 1: Linear Difference Equations

May 28, 2010 | Tony

(This is the first in a series on the use of Graph Algebraic models for Social Science.) Linear Difference models are a hugely important first step in learning Graph Algebraic modeling.  That said, linear difference equations are a completely independent thing from Graph Algebra.  I’ll get into the Graph ... [Read more...]
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