Summary Version 0.8.0 of the Rcpp package was released to CRAN today. This release marks another milestone in the ongoing redesign of the package, and underlying C++ library. Overview Rcpp is an R package and C++ library that facilitates integr...
Summary Version 0.8.0 of the Rcpp package was released to CRAN today. This release marks another milestone in the ongoing redesign of the package, and underlying C++ library. Overview Rcpp is an R package and C++ library that facilitates integr...
I recently wrote a serial connection for R-2.11.0 so that I can communicate with serial devices, for example an old Garmin eTrex Legend. This GPS device is able to output NMEA0183 sentences to a standard serial port (4800,8,1,N). I hooked up the device and used the serial connection to collect some data using some R
Frank Harrell, chair of the Biostatistics department here at Vanderbilt, is giving a seminar entitled "Sweave for Reproducible Research and Beautiful Statistical Reports" tomorrow, Wednesday, May 12, 1:30-2:30pm, in the MRBIII Conference Room 1220. This tutorial covers the basics of Sweave and shows how to enhance the default output in various ways by using: latex methods for converting R...
If you attended Frank Harrell's Regression Modeling Strategies course a few weeks ago, you got a chance to see the rms package for R in action. Frank's rms package does regression modeling, testing, estimation, validation, graphics, prediction, and ty...
I'll be giving a live webinar on Thursday next week (May 20) titled Introduction to Revolution R. If you're new to the R world and wondering what you can do with R, this webinar is for you. I'll also be introducing some of the functionality unique to Revolution R included in our Revolution R Community (free to everyone) and...
Why is the function to print out text in R named "cat"? Why is the function to delete objects called "rm"? Unless you have a background in Unix (or Linux) programming, some of R's command names can seem, well, a bit arcane. Jeromy Anglim explains the provenance of many of R's command names in this post: the details are...
Just a short note concerning a “gotcha”. As I have many times before, I opened an R console on my newly-upgraded (to lucid 10.04) Ubuntu machine, typed source(“http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R”) and began a Bioconductor install with biocLite(). Only this time, I saw this: Error in dyn.load(file, DLLpath = DLLpath, ...) : unable to load shared library '/home/sau103/R/i486-pc-linux-gnu-library/2.11/affyio/libs/affyio.so': 
Wolfram Research presumably has a robot that sends automated email following postings on arXiv: Your article, “Evidence and Evolution: A review”, caught the attention of one of my colleagues, who thought that it could be developed into an interesting Demonstration to add to the Wolfram Demonstrations Project. The Demonstrations Project, launched alongside Mathematica 6 in 
Economist and R blogger JD Long gave a talk last week (as part of the vconf.org project) about why he uses R to do statistical forecasts of agricultural yield for the reinsurance company he works for. I couldn't make the live session, but a replay is now available. The audio's a bit choppy, but if you've every struggled with...
Waterfall charts are often used for analytical purposes in the business setting to show the effect of sequentially introduced negative and/or positive values. Sometimes waterfall charts are also referred to as cascade charts. In the next few paragraphs I will show how to plot a waterfall chart using ggplot2. Data A very small fictional dataset 
The R programming language includes many abbreviations. Abbreviations exist in function names, argument names, and allowed values for arguments. This post expands on over 150 R abbreviations with the aim of making it easier for users new to R who are trying...
The R programming language includes many abbreviations. Abbreviations exist in function names, argument names, and allowed values for arguments. This post expands on over 150 R abbreviations with the aim of making it easier for users new to R who are trying...
Order this book from Amazon Modern Applied Statistics with S (Fourth Edition) is one of the oldest and most popular books on Applied Statistics using R and S-plus. A large number of topics in Applied Statistics are covered in this book and it is certainly not for the faint hearted. A sound knowledge of
Do not resort to Monte Carlo methods unnecessarily. When I received this 2009 Springer-Verlag book, Computational Statistics, by James Gentle a while ago, I briefly took a look at the table of contents and decided to have a better look later… Now that I have gone through the whole book, I can write a short 
When fitting statistical models to data where there are multiple variables we are often interested in adding or removing terms from our model and in cases where there are a large number of terms it can be quicker to use the update function to start with a formula from a model that we have already
In connection with the Bernoulli factory post of last week, Richard Brent arXived a short historical note recalling George Forsythe’s algorithm for simulating variables with density when (the extension to any upper bound is straightforward). The idea is to avoid computing the exponential function by simulating uniforms until since the probability of this event is 
I find options fascinating because they deal with the abstract ideas of volatility and correlation, both of which are unobservable and can often seem like wild animal spirits (take the current stock market as an example). Understanding these subtle concepts is never easy, but it is essential in pricing some of the more exotic
There are a few ways to do this, but the only one that worked for me was to use Rserve and rconnect. In R, do this: 1 2 3 install.packages("Rserve") library(Rserve) Rserve(debug = FALSE, port=6311, args=NULL) Then you can connect in Python very easily. Here is a test in Python: 1 2 rcmd = pyRserve.rconnect(host='localhost', port=6311) print(rcmd('rnorm(100)'))
As part of all the news from yesterday, we also announced our vision and roadmap for the Revolution R product line for 2010. You can see a short summary of our vision in this two-minute video, or see more details in the roadmap whitepaper available for download. But here's a quick overview of our plans: First, we intend to...
We've just launched a beta/preview of a new website for the R community, inside-R.org. The site is sponsored by Revolution Analytics (who funded its development and maintenance), but it's designed for anyone who uses or has in an interest in the R Project generally. So, you might ask, why another community site for R, when there's already several R...