A new version of the OpenStreetMap package is now up on CRAN, and should propagate to all the mirrors in the next few days. The primary purpose of the package is to provide high resolution map/satellite imagery for use in your R plots. The package supports base graphics and ggplot2, as well as transformations between spatial coordinate
As if the London Whale nearly bankrupting Chase Bank wasn't lesson enough, we now hear that an Excel error impacted the conclusions of a major economics paper that influenced the recent austerity policies in the US, UK and elsewhere. Matt Frost says enough is enough, and implores to everyone to stop using error-prone point-and-click tools, and instead use a...
Here is an interview with Ron Hochreiter, Assistant Professor at WU Vienna University Economics and Business. In 25 words or less tell us what you do (using German words is cheating). I consider myself as a data scientist (teaching and research) with roots in Mathematical Programming, i.e. Optimization under Uncertainty (Stochastic Programming). You were an
The post Interview...
You may have already seen a lot written on the replication of Reinhart & Rogoff’s (R & R) much cited 2010 paper done by Herndon, Ash, and Pollin. If you haven’t, here is a round up of some of some of what has been written: Konczal, Yglesias, Krugman, Cowen, Peng,
The best part about writing a dissertation is finding clever ways to procrastinate. The motivation for this blog comes from one of the more creative ways I’ve found to keep myself from writing. I’ve posted about data mining in the past and this post follows up on those ideas using a topic that is relevant 
I was one of the 170 or so people at the Data Science hackathon in London over the weekend. As always this was well run by Carlos and his team who kept us fed, watered and connected to the Internet. One of the three challenges involved a dataset containing pairs of Twitter users, A and
When you woRk, you probably have a set of useful functions/packages you constantly use. For example, I often use the excellent quantmod package, and the nice multi.sapply function. You want your tools loaded when R session fires. In order to … Continue reading →
When work with large amounts of data that is structured in a tabular format, a common operation is to summarize that data in different ways using specific variables. In Microsoft Excel, pivot tables are a nice feature that is used for this purpose. Of course, R also has similar calculations that can be used to 
R is a piece of software, but it is also a community. Help community The most visible aspect of the R community is help. This is also the most useful to new users. The initial sense of cooperation with R was driven mainly by people helping each other. You don’t need to actively participate in
The post R...
Building on the previous posts (post 1 & post 2) I found there were 12 instances with the type of credit where there was a "Primary*" which means the lender borrowed twice in the same day, in the 2010 q4 data. It would seem simple enough in Excel, ...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
