A new minor release of RcppArmadillo is now on CRAN and in Debian. RcppArmadillo brings the Armadillo templated C++ library for linear algebra to R by means of Rcpp.This release contains both a few minor bugfixes from the 4.000 branch of Armadillo and some enhancements in RcppArmadillo itself that are related to the recent Rcpp 0.11.0 release.Changes...
No need for SPSS – beautiful output in R #rstats
About one year ago, I seriously started migrating from SPSS to R. Though I’m still using SPSS (because I have to in some situations), I’m quite comfortable and happy with R now and learnt a lot in the past months. But since SPSS is still very wide spread in social sciences, I get asked every 
dvn – Sharing Reproducible Research from R
Reproducible research involves the careful, annotated preservation of data, analysis code, and associated files, such that statistical procedures, output, and published results can be directly and fully replicated. As the push for reproducible research has grown, the R community has responded with an increasingly large set of tools for engaging in reproducible research practices (see, for example, the
Function to Simplify Loading and Installing Packages
One of the more tedious parts of working with R is maintaining my R library. To make my R scripts reproducible and sharable, I will install packages if they are not available. For example, the top of my R scripts tend to look something like this:if(!require(devtools) | !require(ggplot2) | !require(psych) | !require(lme4) | !require(benchmark)) { install.packages(c('devtools','ggplot2','psych','lme4','benchmark')) }This has worked fine for...
R in Insurance 2014 Conference Poster
Here is the poster for the 2nd R in Insurance conference on Monday 14 July 2014 at Cass Business School in London:R in Insurance 2014 conference poster. Download PDF versionImportant dead lines to keep in mind:Abstract submissions: 28 March 2014Early b...
Backcasting in R
Sometimes it is useful to “backcast” a time series — that is, forecast in reverse time. Although there are no in-built R functions to do this, it is very easy to implement. Suppose x is our time series and we want to backcast for periods. Here is some code that should work for most univariate time series. The example...
Identification of ARMA processes
Last week (in the MAT8181 course) in order to identify the orders of an ARMA process, we’ve seen the eacf method, and I mentioned the scan method, introduced in Tsay and Tiao (1985). The code below – to produce the output of the scan procedure – has been adapted from an old code by Steve Chen (where I included a visualization...
Mumbai, Feb 2014 – inHouse Training Bank Baroda
(This article was first published on Rmetrics blogs, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers) To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on his blog: Rmetrics blogs. R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials on topics such as: visualization (ggplot2, Boxplots, maps, animation), programming (RStudio, Sweave, LaTeX, SQL, Eclipse, git, hadoop, Web...
Books and lessons about ggplot2
I recently got an email from a person at Packt publishing, who suggested I write a book for them about ggplot2. My answer, which is perfectly true, is that I don’t have the time, nor the expertise to do that. What I didn’t say is that 1) a quick web search suggests that Packt doesn’t 
evaluating stochastic algorithms
Reinaldo sent me this email a long while ago Could you recommend me a nice reference about measures to evaluate stochastic algorithms (in particular focus in approximating posterior distributions). and I hope he is still reading the ‘Og, despite my lack of prompt reply! I procrastinated and procrastinated in answering this question as I did not 
Two new free interactive courses with R on DataCamp
We’re happy to announce that as of today, DataCamp has added two new and free online interactive courses to its curriculum: ‘Data Analysis and Statistical Inference‘ and ‘Introduction to Computational Finance‘. They will be the biggest DataCamp courses to date, so we’re very excited to find out what this will give. We developed these courses
Character strings in R
This post deals with the basics of character strings in R. My main reference has been Gaston Sanchez‘s ebook , which is excellent and you should read it if interested in manipulating text in R. I got the encoding’s section from , which is also a nice reference to have nearby. Text analysis will be 
Web-Scraping: the Basics
Slides from the first session of my course about web scraping through R: Web scraping for the humanities and social sciencesIncludes an introduction to the paste function, working with URLs, functions and loops. Putting it all together we fetch data in...
Sampling from a torus
by Joseph Rickert One of the key ideas in topological data analysis is to consider a data set to be a sample from a manifold in some high dimensional topological space and then to use the tools of algebraic topology to reconstruct the manifold. It turns out that the converse problem of taking a random sample from a given...
Atlantic Feature on AI and R
A recent feature article in The Atlantic describes the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and how researchers "conduct sophisticated data analyses using cloud resources such as Amazon Web Services and R, an open source application for statistic...
R: Fun with surf3D function
There is one package that I've been longing. A package that will give me the power to manipulate and do any 3D stuffs in R. I tried persp and wireframe, but I find them difficult to use especially on complicated mathematical functions, like doing param...
Voting Twice in France
On the Monkey Cage blog, Baptiste Coulmont (a.k.a. @coulmont) recently uploaded a post entitled “You can vote twice ! The many political appeals of proxy votes in France“, coauthored with Joël Gombin (a.k.a. @joelgombin), and myself. The study was initially written in French as mentioned in a previous post. Baptiste posted additional information on his blog (http://coulmont.com/blog/…) and I also wanted to post some lines of code,...
New features in the most recent taxize update, v0.2
We just released a new version of taxize - version 0.2.0. This release contains a number of new features, and bug fixes. Here is a run down of some of the changes:First, install and load taxize install.packages("rgbif")library(taxize)New thingsNew functions: class2treeSometimes you just want to have a visual of the taxonomic relationships among taxa. If you don't know how to build...
Global energy forecasting competitions
The 2012 GEFcom competition was a great success with several new innovative forecasting methods introduced. These have been published in the IJF as follows: Hong, Pinson and Fan. Global Energy Forecasting Competition 2012 Charleton and Singleton. A refined parametric model for short term load forecasting Lloyd. GEFCom2012 hierarchical load forecasting: Gradient boosting machines and Gaussian processes Nedelec, Cugliari and Goude: GEFCom2012: Electric...
PISA 2012, occupations and the shiny app
OECD has just released a new PISA in Focus titled “Do parents’ occupations have an impact on student performance?”. A shiny app is an add-on to this article, you can open it from this link: http://beta.icm.edu.pl/PISAoccupations2012/. The app allows for comparisons of average performance in mathematics/reading/science of 15-years old pupils in PISA study across different
Regression with multiple predictors
(This article was first published on Digithead's Lab Notebook, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers) Now that I'm ridiculously behind in the Stanford Online Statistical Learning class, I thought it would be fun to try to reproduce the figure on page 36 of the slides from chapter 3 or page 81 of the book. The result is a curvaceous surface...
ggplot2: Cheatsheet for Visualizing Distributions
In the third and last of the ggplot series, this post will go over interesting ways to visualize the distribution of your data.
Bivariate Densities with N(0,1) Margins
This Monday, in the ACT8595 course, we came back on elliptical distributions and conditional independence (here is an old post on de Finetti’s theorem, and the extension to Hewitt-Savage’s). I have shown simulations, to illustrate those two concepts of dependent variables, but I wanted to spend some time to visualize densities. More specifically what could be the joint density...
R and (Software) Relatives
Post also available with code executed inline at rpubs.com.O'Reilly recently published the results of a survey from attendees of the Strata Conference related to tool usage and salary. The entire survey is available for download. In the survey results, R was heralded as second only to SQL as a tool used by conference attendees. An chart from the...
summary, annotation and visualization of genomic intervals with genomation package
We have been working on new R package, genomation, that will help with the analysis of genomic intervals. Briefly, the package contains a collection of tools for visualizing and analyzing genome-wide data sets. The package works with a variet...
Conference talk submission
The second conference on R in Insurance will be held on Monday 14 July 2014 at Cass Business School in London, UK. The intended audience of the conference includes both academics and practitioners who are active or interested in the applications of R in Insurance. This one-day conference will focus on applications in insurance and The post
Facebook Meets Florence Nightingale and Enrico Fermi
Highlighting Facebook's mistakes and weaknesses is a popular sport. When you're the 800 lb gorilla of social networking, it's inevitable. The most recent rendition of FB bashing appeared in a serious study authored by a couple of academics in the Depar...
Princeton vs. Facebook: modeling contagion
by James Paul Peruvankal, Senior Program Manager at Revolution Analytics Three weeks ago, researchers at Princeton released a study on Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics that states Facebook might lose 80% of its users by 2015-2017. Facebook data scientists hilariously debunked the study stating that Princeton itself would lose all of its students by 2021, using the...
R-bloggers.com just went through a (forced) maintenance – and is back online! (I hope)
Dear R users, R-bloggers is (hopefully) back online! I wanted to update you that in the past two days, the site has been subject to unreasonable amount of traffic (probably spambots of some sort, but it is not clear to me yet). During that time, the site went down for several hours throughout yesterday and until just an hour...
Plotly: collaborative, publication-quality graphing. 
