Over at stats.stackexchange.com recently, a really interesting question was raised about principal component analysis (PCA). The gist was “Thanks to my college class I can do the math, but what does it MEAN?” I felt like this a number of times in my life. Many of my classes were focused on the technical implementations they kinda
Background: A common function in standard GIS software enables users to create a raster surface and extract values or clip it based on a set of polygons. This may be used in cases where you want analysis to be constrained to within a town’s boundaries or a coastline. This tutorial will outline how to create
Background: In some cases it is necessary to conduct the same analysis multiple times on either the same or different data. In such circumstances it is worth writing a function to simplify the code. In this example the location quotient provides a simple calculation easily written in to a function. The location quotient (LQ) is
This is an updated version of my Making Maps with R tutorial. I think the code is lot simpler and it also includes some data for you to play around with. Background: Spatial data are becoming increasingly common, as are the tools available in R to process it. Of course one of the best ways
Getting to know the "apply"s in R is extremely handy for using the language efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately, the help files tend to be rather information-dense and are fairly overwhelming for newcomers. A recent blog post by Neil Saunders pr...
Getting to know the "apply"s in R is extremely handy for using the language efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately, the help files tend to be rather information-dense and are fairly overwhelming for newcomers. A recent blog post by Neil Saunders pr...
Graphing data with a few outliers is challenging, and some solutions are better than others. Here is a comparison of the alternatives.
By number of questions asked, R passed MATLAB for the first time on Stack Overflow today. Thus it seems an appropriate time to write my first R-based post. This post concerns what to do when your R-code goes pear shaped. Back in June there were a couple of very good videos on R debugging that 
At any R Q&A site, you’ll frequently see an exchange like this one: Q: How can I use a loop to ? A: Don’t. Use one of the apply functions. So, what are these wondrous apply functions and how do they work? I think the best way to figure out anything in 
I have been using a lot of R lately in my work. R (main site) is an open source statistical computing platform. Saying R is only used for statistics does not do it justice. I am finding it to be a really powerful statistical and optim...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
