Any R user no matter what level of experience has had trouble finding the package or the function to do what you want to do and then figuring out how to use it.  The sos package in R just made that a lot easier. First, fire up R, then install ... [Read more...]

Today it was once again time for the Chicago Half Marathon (which I have now been running in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008). Conditions were much much better than last year's very heavy rainfall---we were once again treated to a sunny and clear Chicago sky. It was however a little on the humid side ... [Read more...]

Suppose you want a function to fit a neural network. What’s the best way to find it? Here are three steps that help to find the elusive function relatively quickly. First, use help.search("neural") or the shorthand ??neural. This will search the help... [Read more...]

Searching help pages of contributed packages just got easier with the release of the new sos package. This is a replacement for and substantial enhancement of the existing "RSiteSearch" package. To learn more about it, try vignette("sos") We hope... [Read more...]

  Premise SSURGO is a digital, high-resolution (1:24,000), soil survey database produced by the USDA-NRCS. It is one of the largest and most complete spatial databases in the world; and is available for nearly the entire USA at no cost. These data are distributed as a combination of geographic and text data, ... [Read more...]

Revolutions blog recently posted a link to R code by Joshua Reich with self-contained examples of using machine learning techniques in R, including various clustering methods (k-means, nearest neighbor, and kernel), recursive partitioning (CART), principle components analysis, linear discriminant analysis, and support vector machines.  This post also links to some ... [Read more...]

United Nations report World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision (highlights available here) provides data about the historical and forecasted population of the country. In exploring the future and past population trends it is relatively easy to subset the dataset by your selected variable. __ file population names(population) [Read more...]

pre{ font-size:xx-small !important ; border: 1px black solid; } This is a short code snippet that is motivated by this thread on r-help yesterday. The gallery contains a search engine textbox (top-right) that can be used to search for content i... [Read more...]

The ant package has been released to CRAN yesterday. As discussed in previous posts in this blog (here and here), the ant R package provides an R-aware version of the ant build tool from the apache project. The package contains an R script that c... [Read more...]

The other day I was thinking about how expensive will it be to live in London (as I'm going to live in London for almost one year), and also thinking about how expensive are the cities where some of my best friends live and I got a report by UBS ... [Read more...]

Yesterday's upload of RQuantLib 0.3.0 contained one minor oversight: I had failed to update src/Makefile.win to the new and enlarged set of source files. The proper fix (of using wildcards and implicit rules) was simple, and Uwe Ligges kindly rebuilt... [Read more...]

Earlier this evening, I rolled up a new version of RQuantLib. It has been pushed to CRAN and Debian, and source and binary version should appear on the respective mirror networks in due course. This version, the first in a new '0.3.*' release seri... [Read more...]

Suppose we want to create a polynomial that can approximate better the following dataset on the population of a certain Italian city over 10 years. The table summarizes the data:$$\begin{tabular}{|1|1|}\hline Year & Population\\ \hline 1959&4835\\ 1960&4970\\ 1961&5085\\ 1962&5160\\ 1963&5310\\ 1964&5260\\ 1965&5235\\ 1966&5255\\ 1967&5235\\ 1968&5210\\ 1969&5175\\ \hline \end{tabular}$$First we import the data into R:Year Population Now we create ... [Read more...]

Today I noticed a call for R users to gather around a single campfire for one hour and share their questions and answers. The campfire name is stackoverflow.com, a site dedicated for handling programming questions. The event details are bellow: From: ... [Read more...]

I wish I would have discovered this long ago.  Loading data into R or MySQL requires you to specify the full path to the file.  If you do this on a Windows machine there are two annoyances.  First, if you save something to your desktop the path to your desktop ... [Read more...]

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so recently i’m learning how to compile and cross-compile R packages from source for windows machines, which means i have to create windows binaries. the first option is to build on a windows system, and the 2nd is to cross-build on an intel-based linux or mac system. i will ... [Read more...]

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Many distributions may be used to describe patterns that are non-negative; however, there are not as many choices when an upper bound is also needed (although the beta distribution is very flexible). For various reasons, truncated distributions are som... [Read more...]

I have updated the ant package I described yesterday in this blog to add several things Now the R code related to and tasks can either be given as the code attribute or as the text inside the task The R code has acces... [Read more...]