A few weeks ago I wrote about ways to compare major-party returns in US House elections. I experimented with several visualizations, none as useful as the seats-votes curve. A traditional seats-votes cure measures average party performance against individual US House results. Our simplified curve uses a density plot to measure major-party (Democratic, in this case)
My first time at ACM Data Mining Camp was so awesome, that I was thrilled the make the trip up to San Jose for the November 2010 version. In July, I gave a talk at the Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium conference with a faculty member in the Department of Statistics, at the Fairmont. The place was amazing,...
Steve McNally of the Forbes Mean Business blog says R is a name you need to know for 2011. He cites some great examples of R in action: Facebook has used R to figure out that “just two data points are significantly predictive of whether a user remains on Facebook: (i) having more than one session as a new...
There have been some very good visualizations of the Wikileaks data so I decided to create one of the drug war in Mexico
There have been some very good visualizations of the Wikileaks data so I decided to create one of the drug war in Mexico
This google map display is just one of 230 GHCN stations that is located in the water. After finding instances of this phenomena over and over, it seemed an easy thing to find and analyze all such cases in GHCN. The issue matters for a two reasons: In my temperature analysis program I use a 
As Mark Twain said "the art of prophecy is very difficult, especially about the future" (well, actually I am not sure Mark Twain was the first one to say so, but if you're interested by that sentence, you can look here). I have been rather su...
The San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the ACM is will hold its third data mining camp next Saturday (November 13) at the Ebay campus in San José. Like the previous camps, this will be a one-day "unconference"-style event, with an agenda developed ad-hoc on the day according to the interests of the attendee. With data scientists from the...
Yesterday's US election is pretty much over now: most of the results are in, the pundits have offered their political analysis, and there's even been a bit of mathematical analysis of the results, too. But last night as the results were flowing in, R user Brock Tibert just wanted to track the results of the Massachusetts governor's race. The...
In the last six months or so, the behemoth of Q & A sites stackoverflow, decided to change tack and launch a number of other non-computing-language sites. To launch a site in the stackoverflow family, sites have to spend time gathering followers in Area51. Once a site has gained a critical mass, a new StackExchange 
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
