In our pre-conference workshop, Brian Peterson and I worked with the EDHEC hedge fund indexes as a way to demonstrate how to use PortfolioAnalytics within the context of long-term allocation problems. Although they are not investible, these indexes are probably more representative than most given that they are, in fact, meta-indexes. Other indexes might be 
RDieHarder is an R package providing access to the DieHarder battery of tests for random number generators developed by Robert G. Brown and others. DieHarder had been updated to version 3.1.1 a while back, and I had been a little behind with updating...
2011 was a volatile year, no doubt about that, but was it exceptionally so from a historic point of view? To quantify the volatility, I used the Dow Jones Industrial average, which goes back to 1928 on Yahoo Finance: A volatile year no doubt, but once again confirming the fact that, in markets behaviour at 
Gain chart is a popular method to visually inspect model performance in binary prediction. It presents the percentage of captured positive responses as a function of selected percentage of a sample. It is easy to obtain it using ROCR package plott...
The R core team announced today that R 2.13.2 is now available: The byte pixies have rolled up R-2.13.2.tar.gz at 9:00 this morning. This is intended to be the final release of the 2.13 series, for the benefit of those apprehensive of putting 2.14.x into production use. This update fixes a number of minor bugs (for example, pch="." will...
Here’s a post generated from my own ignorance of statistics (as opposed to just being marred by it)! In Labor Economics we walked through something called the truncated normal distribution. Truncated distributions come up a lot in the sciences because … Continue reading →
Got for 2010 Xmas a very cool book called the "4 Hour Body"(thanks Jose Santos) written by Tim Ferriss who write a previous favorite of mine about productivity, the 4 hour work week. Its an interesting book, because it has a scientific approach, it ...
On the first article, we saw a quick-and-dirty method to predict disk space exhaustion when the usage pattern is rigorously linear. We did that by importing our data into R and making a linear regression. In this article we will see the problems wit...
On the first article, we saw a quick-and-dirty method to predict disk space exhaustion when the usage pattern is rigorously linear. We did that by importing our data into R and making a linear regression. In this article we will see the problems wit...
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)
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
