Dear R people, It is a (VERY) rare event that I allow a non-R related content on R-bloggers. Today is one such rare a day. I do this in order to raise awareness of two bills in congress: H.R.3261 “Stop Online Piracy Act” and S.968 “PROTECT IP”, which could radically change the landscape of the Internet. These...
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Call for Proposals for The R Series from Chapman & Hall/CRC
(This is a guest post based on Calver, Rob e-mail to the R-help mailing list) We are delighted to announce that our new series of books on R is up and running, with two books already published and another nine forthcoming (including three set to publish in 2012). We are keen to receive proposals for...
More Thoughts on US Death Spiral
What troubles me most about today’s environment is the persistent belief that crisis large or small results in a US dollar rally and lower Treasury rates. However, what happens if the US dollar and US Treasury rates are the source of the crisis? Then...
A word of warning about grep, which and the like
I’ve often selected columns or rows of a data frame using grep or which, based on some property. That is inherently sound, but the trouble comes when you wish to remove rows or columns based on that grep or which call, e.g., which would remove columns with a .1 in the name. This is...
Plotting git statistics
Here’s a funny story – friend of my, avid gamer at that time, was going downhill on a bicycle when wonderful idea flashed his mind: I need to save the current status… Just in case if I crash, I will start again from the top of the hill. If you are a developer (quantitative...
SAS, R and categorical variables
One of the disappointing problems in SAS (as I need PROC MIXED for some analysis) is to recode categorical variables to have a particular reference category. In R, my usual tool, this is rather easy both to set and to modify using the relevel command available in base R (in the stats package). My...
Measuring the EIU Democracy Index (with Polity IV)
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 “Democratic-ness” of the world’s countries for...
A surprising(?) prediction about the S&P 500
Financial analyst Greg Troccoli was a lone wolf when he predicted in July 2010 that “If the Index held at or above our proprietary support zone (1000.00- 950.00 region), it would eventually trade to a new historical high within 12 - 18 months (July- December 2011 timeframe)”. For reference, the S&P500 all-time high...
About Fig. 4 of Fagundes et al. (2007)
Yesterday, we had a meeting of our EMILE network on statistics for population genetics (in Montpellier) and we were discussing our respective recent advances in ABC model choice. One of our colleagues mentioned the constant request (from referees) to include the post-ABC processing devised by Fagundes et al. in their 2007 ABC paper. (This...
I wish I knew everything about R. I wish I could vectorise in my…
I wish I knew everything about R. I wish I could vectorise in my sleep. I wish there were perfect R packages out there to solve all my data transformation problems. I wish there were perfect data. If I were Paul Graham, would I ever write code like the...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).