Nostalgia ain't what it used to be. As slashdot slowly loses its relevance and digg heads for a more general audience to head off competition from Twitter, loyal readers of uber-technical news aggregator Hacker News wonder if it's heading the same way. Seems like the long-standing users aren't posting links to deep, interesting articles anymore, and are instead being...
Internal Migration Estimation in England and Wales
During my MS.c. I worked on methods for combining internal migration data in England and Wales. Migration data is often represented in square tables of origin-destination flows. These are of particular interest to analysing migration patterns when they are disaggregated … Continue reading →
New R User Group in Portland, OR
There's another new R user group on the US West Coast, this time in Portland, Oregon. The Portland R User Group will hold their first meeting at the Lucky Labrador Brew Pub on Tuesday, August 17. If you're in the Portland/Vancouver area, come along for beeRs and conversation with other useRs in your area. Incidentally, there are so many...
Are MLB Games Getting Longer?
On July 29, 2010, I had a flight from Denver to Cincinnati. About an hour before boarding, I went to ESPN’s website and found a new article by Bill Simmons, a.k.a The Sports Guy (@sportsguy33 on Twitter). The basic premise of this article is that a core group of fans is losing interest in Red 
R helps reproducible research
While reading a paper on mutualistic networks in press at Ecology, by Jimena Dorado et al., I found the following sentence in the Materials & methods section: Correlation analyses were done using the cor.test function in the basepackage of R (…)
Big data for R
Big data for R
Plotting texts as graphs with R and igraph
I’ve plotted several word association graphs for this New York Times article (1st paragraph) using R and the igraph library. #1, random method #2, circle method #3, sphere method #4, spring method #5, fruchterman-reingold method # 6, kamada-kawai method #7, graphopt method The red vertices mark cliques. Here’s the (rough) R code for plotting such
Hacking the CISEN homicide data
The director of the CISEN, the Mexican agency in charge of generating intelligence to safeguard Mexico's security, said in a presentation yesterday that the number of homicides linked to the drug war was a little over 28,000 since the start of the Calderon administration.
Guillermo Valdés didn't provide the raw data so I used Engauge to digitize...
Hacking the CISEN homicide data
The director of the CISEN, the Mexican agency in charge of generating intelligence to safeguard Mexico's security, said in a presentation yesterday that the number of homicides linked to the drug war was a little over 28,000 since the start of the Calderon administration.
Guillermo Valdés didn't provide the raw data so I used Engauge to digitize...
Recent arXiv postings
With too little time, too many things to do on my plate, here are some recent arXiv postings I won’t have time to comment: Adaptive Monte Carlo on multivariate binary sampling spaces. (arXiv:1008.0055v1) Mixture Decomposition of Distributions using a Decomposition of the Sample Space. (arXiv:1008.0204v1) Bayesian Model Selection for Beta Autoregressive Processes. (arXiv:1008.0121v1) Reference priors 
Integrating R with Geany
According to landroni, R can also be easily integrated with Geany:Download 0.19 (non-optional), then you need to set send_selection_unsafe=true in geany.conf and assign "Send selection to terminal" to a ctrl+r keybinding or similar. As long as you...
ggplot2 gui: Major feature set complete
(Written by Ian Fellows) There has been quite a bit of progress on the ggplot2 graphical user interface since the last post. All of the major features have been implemented, and are outlined in the vlog links below. What remains is to fix bugs, improve interface elements, and listen to feedback from users (that’s you). 
U.S. Unemployment Data: Animated Choropleth Maps
I was curious about creating maps with ggplot2 - and was happy to find that great minds have long since tackled this topic. Folks who are interested in how to learn about R (and ggplot2) might be interested in the process. (There should be ...
use R! 2010 conference — reflections
From July 20-23, this year's use R! conference took place in Gaithersburg near Washington. I attended the conference as part of my holidays in the
U.S. and had a good time there. I met some people, even though that is not the easiest thing for me to do, and I got some inspirations and ideas
I outline below:
Stat apps
One...
R Creators Accept Statistical Computing Award
In a dedicated session at the JSM conference here in Vancouver, the creators of R, Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka, accepted their prize (announced in January, but awarded today) from the American Statistical Association for "innovation in computing, software, or graphics that has had a great impact on statistical practice or research". It's a well-justified award: as stated by...
How Google and Facebook are using R
This is an older (2009) video from the kickoff meeting of the San Francisco Bay Area R Users Group. It was a panel discussion within the Predictive Analytics World conference. Video courtesy by Ron Fredericks of LectureMaker (click on the … Continue reading →
RQuantLib 0.3.3
A new release (now at version 0.3.3) of RQuantLib is now on CRAN and in Debian. RQuantLib combines (some of) the quantitative analytics of QuantLib with the R statistical computing environment and language. Many of the changes in this new version are ...
RQuantLib 0.3.3
A new release (now at version 0.3.3) of RQuantLib is now on CRAN and in Debian. RQuantLib combines (some of) the quantitative analytics of QuantLib with the R statistical computing environment and language. Many of the changes in this new version ...
JSM 2010 [day 3]
![JSM 2010 [day 3]](http://www.r-bloggers.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/img_7402-e1280891699102.jpg?w=450&h=180)
The same pattern as yesterday occurred, namely that the sessions that most interested me were all together at the 10:30 and 2pm slots, while there was no talk (besides the official ones) after 4pm… After another run around Stanley Park, I took the opportunity of being late for the first session to sit outside and 
Meeting in the middle; or fudging model II regression with nls
My colleague Karen needed an equation to predict trunk diameter given tree height, which she hoped to base on measurements of trees in semi-arid Australian woodlands. This is the dark art of allometry and a quick google found a large number of formulae that have been used in different studies of tree dimensions. No problem: I started to...
Meeting in the middle; or fudging model II regression with nls
My colleague Karen needed an equation to predict trunk diameter given tree height, which she hoped to base on measurements of trees in semi-arid Australian woodlands. This is the dark art of allometry and a quick google found a large number of formulae...
Suggestions for R-Chart iPhone App?
Have any ideas for news sources to include in the new R-Chart iPhone App? I am hoping to make some revisions and fixes and figured I would get some feedback from anyone who happened download it. Specifically, I am planning on removing...
RODM Article on the Oracle Technology Network
A new article over at OTN demonstrates the new RODM package that allows you to control Oracle Data Mining within the database itself using R. This and the recent announcement over at Revolution Analytics both reveal more solutions for proces...
Using R and r.mapcalc (GRASS) to Estimate Mean Topographic Curvature
Recently I was re-reading a paper on predictive soil mapping (Park et al, 2001), and considered testing one of their proposed terrain attributes in GRASS. The attribute, originally described by Blaszczynski (1997), is the distance-weighted mean differe...
countrycode R package
I am digging this countrycode package in R I just found, written by a UM grad student Vincent Arel-Bundock. Very nice. Thanks! countrycode("2","cown","iso3c") "USA" It would be better if the package could handle failed matches a little more gracefully: e.g., > countrycode(c(2,730,818),"cown","iso3c") "USA" when the user was expecting to get back a vector
Image Data and Classification with R
03.08.2010 In this post i would like to demonstrate the ability of R to handle and classify image data with the help of ImageJ and Rserve bundled and implemented in Bio7. In general R is a very useful application for image analysis and plenty of “pure” R packages for image analysis are already available. But
Announcing Big Data for Revolution R
I've hinted this was coming a few times before, but with today's press release the announcement is official: the next release of Revolution R Enterprise will include "Big Data" capabilities thanks to the new RevoScaleR package. We're pretty excited at how it's turned out: it's kinda amazing to be able to use R's formula syntax like this: arrDelayLm2 <-...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
