Over the last Sunday breakfast I went through Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data. The first two pages managed to put me in a prejudiced mood for the rest of the book. To wit: the author starts with some math bashing (like, no one ever bothers to tell us about the uses of 
A few days ago a colleague came to me for advice on the interpretation of some data. The dataset was large and included measurements for twenty-six species at several site-year-plot combinations. A substantial amount of effort had clearly been made to ensure every species at every site over several years was documented. I don’t pretend 
April 1, 2013 – Although the capabilities of the R system for data analytics have been expanding with impressive speed, it has heretofore been missing important fundamental methods. A new function works with the popular plyr package to provide these missing … Continue reading →
Business dashboards are available in many shapes and sizes. Business dashboards are useful to create an overview of key performance indicators (KPIs) important for the business strategy and/or operations. There are many flavours of dashboard frameworks and apps available, ranging in price from thousands of dollars to open-source implementations. Apparently Read more »
As you may (or may not) be aware of, R 3.0.0 is scheduled to be released on April 3rd. Since this is a major release and there may be some growing pains (but I hope not) in the move 3.0.0, here is some information about how I will handle R 3.0.0 on CR...
This morning, Mathieu had a nice experience in his course on computational method in actuarial science. But let us start with some mathematical formal definitions. First, recall that is – somehow – a standard expression. No one should be surprised to see such an expression. Generally (as explained in http://en.wikipedia.org/… ), this function is defined only when . The...
Programmers have long been very proud and loyal with their tools, and often very vocal. This has led to well-contested rivalries and “fights” about which tool is better: emacs or vi; Java or C++; Perl or Python; Django or Rails; … Continue reading →
The post Python vs R vs SPSS … Can’t All Programmers Just Get Along?...
A new relase 0.10.3 of Rcpp is now on CRAN and in Debian. This is the fourth release in the 0.10.* series, and further extends and solidifies the excellent Rcpp attributes. A few other bugs were fixed as well, and support for wide character string...
Maximum Sharpe Portfolio or Tangency Portfolio is a portfolio on the efficient frontier at the point where line drawn from the point (0, risk-free rate) is tangent to the efficient frontier. There is a great discussion about Maximum Sharpe Portfolio or Tangency Portfolio at quadprog optimization question. In general case, finding the Maximum Sharpe Portfolio 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
