An introduction to Bayesian analysis and why you might care. Fight club The subject of statistics is about how to learn. Given that it is about the unknown, it shouldn’t be surprising that there are deep differences of opinion on how to go about doing it (in spite of the stereotype that statisticians are accountants … Continue reading...
Another Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project this summer focused on creating functions for doing returns-based performance attribution. I’ve always been a little puzzled about why this functionality wasn’t covered already, but I think that most analysts do this kind of work in Excel. That, of course, has its own perils. But beyond the workflow 
I created an R package a while back to interact with some APIs that serve up data on what our elected represenatives are up to, including the New York Times Congress API, and the Sunlight Labs API. What kinds of things can you do with govdat? Here ...
As some of you may know already, I’m co-organizing an upcoming conference called DataGotham that’s taking place in September. To help spread the word about DataGotham, I’m cross-posting the most recent announcement below: We’d like to let you know about DataGotham: a celebration of New York City’s data community! http://datagotham.com This is an event run
A herd of heuristic algorithms is compared using a portfolio optimization. Previously “A comparison of some heuristic optimization methods” used two simple and tiny portfolio optimization problems to compare a number of optimization functions in the R language. This post expands upon that by using a portfolio optimization problem that is of a realistic size … Continue reading...
As mentioned in FOSS Trading post A New plot.xts yesterday “The Google Summer of Code (2012) project to extend xts has produced a very promising new plot.xts function. Michael Weylandt, the project's student, wrote R-SIG-Finance to request impressio...
The Google Summer of Code (2012) project to extend xts has produced a very promising new plot.xts function. Michael Weylandt, the project's student, wrote R-SIG-Finance to request impressions, feedback, and bug reports. The function is hous...
Today I want to highlight a whitepaper about Adaptive Asset Allocation by Butler, Philbrick and Gordillo and the discussion by David Varadi on the robustness of parameters of the Adaptive Asset Allocation algorithm. In this post I will follow the steps of the Adaptive Asset Allocation paper, and in the next post I will show 
I unfortunately was not there, but we can vicariously enjoy it via the presentations that are posted on the conference website. Below is my take on the highlights (in chronological order). Peter Carl and Brian Peterson “Constructing Strategic Hedge Fund Portfolios” is wonderful from my perspective. Promoting random portfolios is sure to win my heart. … Continue reading...
In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. The Environmental Performance Index website uses R to rank countries by measures like environmental health and ecosystem vitality. A log-linear regression in R predicted the gold-winning Olympic 100m sprint time to be 9.68 seconds (it was actually 9.63 seconds). Some R-related talks...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
