You need to use the data from internet, but don’t type, you can just extract or scrape them if you know the web URL. Thanks to XML package from R. It provides amazing readHTMLtable() function. For a study case, I want to scrape data: US Airline Custo...
I’ve been writing functions in R for a while to do various things like talking to APIs, web scraping, model testing and data visualisation (basically thing which can get a bit repetitive!), but have always been slightly intimidated about turning those functions into a package, which I could then call using library (package-name). Note that … Continue reading...
R is used extensively in the financial industry; many of my recent clients have been working in or developing products for the financial sector. Some common applications are to use R to analyze market data and evaluate quantitative trading strategies. Custom solutions are almost always the best way to do this, but the quantstrat package
The post Installing...
In the last two posts we saw how to download posts from R-bloggers, and then extract the title, author and date of each post and write that information to a csv file. Since we now have a nice data set from r-bloggers, we can start to examine the develo...
Introduction R-bloggers.com is a blog aggregator maintained by Tal Galili. It is a great website for both learning about R and keeping up-to-date with the latest developments (because someone will probably, and very kindly, post about the status of some R related feature). There is also an R-bloggers facebook page where a number of 
In my previous post I showed how to write a small simple python script to download the pages of R-bloggers.com. If you followed that post and ran the script, you should have a folder on your hard drive with 2409 .html files labeled post1.html , post2....
In this post I promised to show how I use Python with the BeautifulSoup and Mechanize modules to scrape information from different websites. As a fun exercise, and something that should interest the readers of R-bloggers, I thought it would be interest...
Introduction On Tuesday January 3rd 2012 the Iowa Republican party held it’s presidential caucuses, with Mitt Romney beating Rick Santorum by 8 votes as of noon on Jan 4th. This was an exciting race with multiple lead changes and entrance polling showing many late undecideds and large gaps in candidate support by age and income.
Introduction First day back to work after New Year celebrations and my brain doesn’t really want to think too much. So I went out for lunch and had a nice walk in the park. Still had 15 minutes to kill before my lunch break was over and so decided to kill some time with a quick web 
In searching for some information on web-scrapers, I found a great presentation given at Pycon in 2010 by Asheesh Laroia. I thought this might be a valuable resource for R users who are looking for ways to gather data from user-unfriendly websites. The...
Zero Inflated Models and Generalized Linear Mixed Models with R.
Zuur, Saveliev, Ieno (2012).
