Image by Timothy Poulton A long-standing paradigm among savers and investors is to favor a mixture of 40% bonds and 60% equities. The simple rationale is that stocks will provide greater returns while bonds will serve as a diversifier when if equities fall. If you are saving for your pension, you probably heard this
Heres a couple of functions for calculating the confidence intervals for proportions. Firstly I give you the Simple Asymtotic Method: simpasym <- function(n, p, z=1.96, cc=TRUE){ out <- list() if(cc){ out$lb <- p - z*sqrt((p*(1-p))/n) - 0.5/n out$ub <- p + z*sqrt((p*(1-p))/n) + 0.5/n } else { out$lb <- 
Recently I encountered an R package called pingr, made by Rasmus Bååth (the same guy who did MCMC in a web page, my visualization of 2013). You install it, you type ping(), and it goes ping. Nice. In fact there … Continue reading →
(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...
If you have deployed your Shiny-app on internet, you may curious about: how many users are using my app? Is the server powerful enough for hosting the app? You can get answers through the Server monitoring feature if you are using the Professional edition of Shiny server. What if we are using the Open source edition? Officially, there...
A new release of the BH package is now on CRAN and its mirrors. BH provides (a sizeable subset of) the Boost library for C++, particularly (large) parts delivered as pure template headers not requiring linking. See the BH page for more details....
A question I’ve googled before without success. Hopefully this answer will show up for someone who needs it. I’ll also go over the better-known uses of ? just in case.To get help in R about a function like subset you type ?subset . That’s like man subset from the command line. If you only know roughly what you’re looking for use double...
For all those people asking me how to obtain a print version of my book “Forecasting: principles and practice” with George Athanasopoulos, you now can. Order on Amazon.com Order on Amazon.co.uk Order on Amazon.fr The online book will continue to be freely available. The print version of the book is intended to help fund the development of the OTexts...
Introduction Reason #2: RStudio’s manipulate Do It Yourself Next TimeIntroductionThis is is second in a projected five-part series of posts aimed at colleagues who teach elementary statistics. If you teach with R but hesitate to spring such a powerful and...
by Joseph Rickert Norman Matloff professor of computer science at UC Davis, and founding member of the UCD Dept. of Statistics has begun posting as Mad(Data)Scientist. (You may know Norm from his book, The Art of R Programming: NSP, 2011.) In his second post (out today) on the new R package, freqparcoord, that he wrote with Yinkang Xie, Norm...
Interaction are the funny interesting part of ecology, the most fun during data analysis is when you try to understand and to derive explanations from the estimated coefficients of your model. However you do need to know what is behind these estimate, there is a mathematical foundation between them that you need to be aware 
After my posts on timeline, Sankey and calendar charts, this will be the last to introduce new chart types of the developer version of googleVis. Today I will give examples for the new annotation charts and histograms.Annotation chartsAnnotation charts...
Today’s highly active R user base is developing, re-developing, and releasing R packages at a never-before-seen rate. While this is fantastic news for the R community as such, it inevitably also causes growing pains as mentioned before. One of the often cited problems is the painful and time-consuming task to keep track of changes and version updates of
by Mike Bowles Mike Bowles is a machine learning expert and serial entrepreneur. This is the second post in what is envisioned as a four part series that began with Mike's Thumbnail History of Ensemble Models. One of the main reasons for using R is the vast array of high-quality statistical algorithms available in R. Ensemble methods provide a...
devtools 1.5 is now available on CRAN. It includes four new functions make it easier to add useful infrastructure to packages: add_test_infrastructure() will create testthat infrastructure when needed. add_rstudio_project() adds an Rstudio project file to your package. add_travis() adds a basic template for travis-ci. add_build_ignore() makes it easy to add files to .Rbuildignore, escaping special 
Trading Ethos for LogosUp until very recently (the last 10 years) it has been uncommon for social science researchers to share their data even when the sharing would neither compromise the private information of the subjects nor the validity of the stu...
A free webinar will provide an introduction to the “JMBayes” R package which provides methods for Joint Modeling of Longitudinal and Time-to-Event Data under a Bayesian Approach. Webinar Format: - Introduction to Joint Models and the JMBayes R package - … Continue reading →
CESifo Group in Munich is publishing a couple of very good articles covering the EU Region.In a most recent research I'm trying to use the monthly Business Climate Index from ifo as a layer to trigger further trading activities in R.Here are further De...
I recently downloaded a very cool dataset on Ontario libraries from the Ontario Open Data Catalogue. The dataset contains 142 columns of information describing 386 libraries in Ontario, representing a fantastically massive data collection effort for such important cultural institutions (although … Continue reading →
Conrad released a new upstream release 4.200 for Armadillo, his templated C++ library for linear algebra, earlier today.As usual, this was rolled up in a new RcppArmadillo release 0.4.200.0; I had actually made two pre-releases leading up his 4.20...
I recently looked at the strategy that invests in the components of S&P/TSX 60 index, and discovered that there are some abnormal jumps/drops in historical data that I could not explain. To help me spot these points and remove them, I created a helper function data.clean() function in data.r at github. Following is an example 
There is no database containing information on all the dams in the United States. The single largest source is the National Inventory of Dams (NID) from the US Army Corps of Engineers which claims to have more than 80,000 dams. I downloaded the en...
Here’s some fun I had today. If you are looking at some published stats and they tell you a percentage but not the numerator & denominator, you can still work them out. That’s to say, you can get your computer … Continue reading →
In case you missed them, here are some articles from March of particular interest to R users: Francis Smart offers five excellent reasons to use R, and notes that R is the top Google Search for statistical software. Revolution Analytics is offering R training for SAS users in Singapore and online. The number of R user groups worldwide continues...
Last month I announced the launch of, a new R jobs website for R users, called: R-users.com. My intention is to post new jobs on r-bloggers around twice a month. You are invited to use this link, to post new a R job (it’s free). Registration takes less than 10 seconds. Here are the new R jobs for 2014-04-07: Full-Time Staff Data ScientistBD...
I’ve just updated the section below from The Popularity of Data Analysis Software. Note that the overall article is still under construction and all the figure numbers have changed from previous versions. Growth in Capability The capability of analytics software … Continue reading →
I am working on a project related to secondary effects of earthquakes. To guide me in the analysis I need a chart showing the location, magnitude and depth of recent earthquakes. There are a host of such charts available already, but since I had the required data on hand, it seemed like a good idea
We all heard the story several times that active Managers are not worth the Management Fee they charge you or more nicely phrased Active Manager hardly add value.Let's assume our Active Manager is benchmarked against the DAX. We are investigating if a ...
Last week, we’ve been through the book, completely, one last time, before sending it back to the publisher, with some comments and remarks, before publication ! So, this is it, the book will finally appear soon ! It was schedule for this week actually, but… you know. It should appear sometime by the end of May, or beginning of...
Plotly: collaborative, publication-quality graphing. 
