Prefer = for assignment in R

April 28, 2013
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Prefer = for assignment in R

(This article was first published on Win-Vector Blog » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers) We share our opinion that = should be preferred to the more standard <- for assignment in R. This is from a draft of the appendix of our upcoming book. This has the risk of becoming an R version of Javascript’s semicolon controversy, but...

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Funky music in funky months: Does my taste of music change over the year?

April 28, 2013
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Funky music in funky months: Does my taste of music change over the year?

I already introduced some stuff I did with the last.fm API. But did you ever wonder if your taste of music changes over the year? Sunny music in the sunny months and dark music in darker months? Well, I did. And I want to check it out with the RLastFM ...

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Quantify your jogging

April 28, 2013
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Quantify your jogging

Numbers are useful (I think we can all agree on that..). If you own a smart phone, you can install this runmeter app. When you run, you can take the smartphone with you and activate this app to collect interesting … Continue reading

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Slides and exercise from my second R intro seminar

April 28, 2013
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Slides and exercise from my second R intro seminar

(This article was first published on There is grandeur in this view of life » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers) This week I held the second introductory seminar on R, and I think it went pretty well — though I guess you really should ask my colleagues if you want to know. The first seminar was a lecture,...

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The Dynamics of a Zombie Apocalypse

April 27, 2013
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The Dynamics of a Zombie Apocalypse

(This article was first published on Econometrics by Simulation, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers) # Zombies vs Humans Agent Based Simulation (the r script file in case blogger mangled my code)# This simulation is a simple repeated matching simulation in which each agent is matched with a random different agent.# I believe this is an appropriate way of modelling a human...

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Posteriors vs predictives

April 26, 2013
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Karl Saliba writes with some queries about our football paper, which I have already discussed on the blog here. He says:Thanks to the code in the appendix I could easily replicate (by using WinBUGS) a similar analysis on any football league of my ...

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Revolution Newsletter: April 2013

April 26, 2013
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The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full April edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Now Available: Revolution R Enterprise 6.2. Released today, this update further enhances the performance,...

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The Financial Crisis on Tape Part II

April 26, 2013
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The Financial Crisis on Tape Part II

First, I would like to welcome all of you reading this via R-Bloggers. I have been a user of this superb resource for years and I'm proud that I now have the opportunity to contribute!In The Financial Crisis on Tape Part I I demonst...

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Learning to code in R

April 25, 2013
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Learning to code in R

It used to be that the one of the first decisions to make when learning to program was between compiled (e.g. C or FORTRAN) and interpreted (e.g. Python) languages. In my opinion these days one would have to be a … Continue reading

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FasteR! HigheR! StongeR! – A Guide to Speeding Up R Code for Busy People

April 25, 2013
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FasteR! HigheR! StongeR! – A Guide to Speeding Up R Code for Busy People

This is an overview of tools for speeding up your R code that I wrote for the Davis R Users’ Group.

First, Ask “Why?”

It’s customary to quote Donald Knuth at this point, but instead I’ll quote my twitter buddy Ted Hart to illustrate a point:

I’m just going to say it.I like for loops in #Rstats,...

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GSoC and R: Off to the Races

April 25, 2013
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GSoC and R: Off to the Races

Google Summer of Code has now opened for student applications, and the R Project has once again been selected as a mentoring organization.  I’ve discussed before that a variety of mentors have proposed a number of projects for students to work on during this summer, but I wanted to emphasize some points about the schedule. The deadline for

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Lahman: A New R Package for Baseball Stats

April 25, 2013
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Lahman: A New R Package for Baseball Stats

by Joseph Rickert Baseball fans have been serious about statistics since Carl Pearson was a young man (although I doubt that Carl followed the game). It is not clear, though, exactly when baseball statisticians moved from doing descriptive stats into predictive analytics. In his book Super Crunchers, Ian Ayers credits Bill James of Baseball Abstract fame for getting this...

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A Call for Context-Aware Measurement

April 25, 2013
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A Call for Context-Aware Measurement

Context awareness seems to be everywhere, and everyone seems to be saying that context matters.  Gartner foresees "a game-changing opportunity" in what it calls context-aware computing.  The title of their report states it best, "Context Shap...

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A plea for less word clouds

April 25, 2013
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A plea for less word clouds

Word cloud of DOMA hearing transcriptsI must admit, there is something appealing about the word cloud - that is, until you try to understand what it actually means...Word clouds are pervasive - even in the science world. I was somewhat spurred to write...

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interesting puzzle

April 25, 2013
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interesting puzzle

In addition to its weekly mathematics puzzles, Le Monde is now publishing a series of vulgarisation books on mathematics, under the patronage of Cédric Villani. Jean-Michel Marin brought me two from the series, one on the golden number and one on Pythagoras’ theorem. (This is actually a translation of a series published by El Pais

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A brainfuck interpreter for R

April 24, 2013
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A brainfuck interpreter for R

The deadline for my book on R is fast approaching, so naturally I’m in full procrastination mode.  So much so that I’ve spent this evening creating a brainfuck interpreter for R.  brainfuck is a very simple programming language: you get an array of 30000 bytes, an index, and just 8 eight commands.  You move the

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Free e-Copy of Bayesian Computation with R (Use R)

April 24, 2013
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Free e-Copy of Bayesian Computation with R (Use R)

Amazon is currently making the first edition of Bayesian Computation with R (Use R) by Jim Albert available for free on Kindle. I own a copy of the book and there is a lot of good content and R examples on how one can do general Bayesian statistics.  The R scripts  from the book (2nd edition but

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Stamen maps with spplot

Stamen maps with spplot

Several R packages provide an interface to query map services (Google Maps, Stamen Maps or OpenStreetMap) to obtain raster images …

Continuar leyendo »

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Announcing Revolution R Enterprise 6.2

April 24, 2013
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Announcing Revolution R Enterprise 6.2

We are pleased to announce that Revolution R Enterprise Release 6.2 is available to new subscribers today. This new software release from Revolution Analytics includes a number of key new features: Support for open source R 2.15.3, the latest stable release of R. Since Release 2.14.2, the R Project has added 89 new features, 11 performance enhancements and 139...

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Bank of England Fan Charts in R

April 24, 2013
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Bank of England Fan Charts in R

I managed to catch David Spiegelhalter’s Tails You Win on BBC iplayer last week. I missed it the first time round, only for my parents on my last visit home to tell me about a Statistician jumping out of a … Continue reading

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Learn how to analyze data with R with Coursera’s "Data Analysis" videos

April 23, 2013
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If you didn't manage to catch Coursera's Data Analysis course, don't despair. Instructor Jeff Leek has made the course videos available on YouTube, which you can review at your leisure to learn how to plan, carry out, and communicate analyses of real data sets with R. (The course assumes you already have familiarity with R, so if you're new...

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Concerto v4.b web-based Content Management System for R Users

April 23, 2013
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Concerto is a open source R Content Management System for developing online applications.  The primary purpose of Concerto is for the designing of online tests.  However, the hard working programmers at the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre have created a program that is flexible enough to address a wide range of applications such as the development of statistical learning...

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Python Compliments R’s Shortcomings

April 23, 2013
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Python Compliments R’s Shortcomings

I’m a big fan of open-source software for research. For example, R-statistics, Qgis, and Grass GIS are awesome programs. R can do any statistical tests and numerical modeling you can imagine; if there’s not a built-in function you can write … Continue reading

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Slides from my R intro seminar

April 23, 2013
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Slides from my R intro seminar

Here are my slides from a short introductory seminar on R (essentially going through part I of the R tutorial) last week. As magic lantern pictures go, they’re hideously ugly, but they were mostly there for future reference. Most of the seminar was spent showing RStudio. This Friday, we’ll practice some uses of qplot and make

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The Foundation for Open Access Statistics

April 23, 2013
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Earlier this month we blogged about Harvard Professors Gary King and Stuart Shieber providing advice to graduate students about open access, dissertations, and journal publishing. We also mentioned some of the great initiatives that facilitate open access publishing in the statistics community, like the Journal of Statistical Software (JSS), The R Journal and arxiv.org. The ...

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wapply: A faster (but less functional) ‘rollapply’ for vector setups

April 23, 2013
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wapply: A faster (but less functional) ‘rollapply’ for vector setups

For some cryptic reason I needed a function that calculates function values on sliding windows of a vector. Googling around soon brought me to ‘rollapply’, which when I tested it seems to be a very versatile function. However, I wanted to code my own version just for vector purposes in the hope that it may

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Review: Kölner R Meeting 12 April 2013

April 23, 2013
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Review: Kölner R Meeting 12 April 2013

Our 5th Cologne R user group meeting was the best attended meeting so far, with 20 members finding their way to the Institute of Sociology for two talks by Diego de Castillo on shiny and Stephan Holtmeier on cluster analysis, followed by beer and schnitzel at the Lux, a gastropub nearby.

Shiny

Diego gave an overview of...

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Installation of WRS package (Wilcox’ Robust Statistics)

April 22, 2013
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Some users had trouble installing the WRS package from R-Forge. Here’s a method that should work automatically and fail-safe: ?View Code RSPLUS# first: install dependent packages install.packages(c("MASS", "akima", "robustbase"))   # second: install suggested packages install.packages(c("cobs", "robust", "mgcv", "scatterplot3d", "quantreg", "rrcov", "lars", "pwr", "trimcluster", "multicore", "mc2d", "psych", "Rfit"))   # third: install WRS install.packages("WRS", repos="http://R-Forge.R-project.org",

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Adding Percentiles to PDQ

April 22, 2013
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Adding Percentiles to PDQ

PQD performs a mean value analysis of queueing network models: mean values in; mean values out. By mean, I mean statistical mean or average. Mean input values include such queueing metrics as service times and arrival rates. These could be sample means. Mean output values include such queueing metrics as waiting time and queue length. These are computed means...

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