The results from the KDD Cup 2009 challenge (which we wrote about before) are in, and the winner of the slow challenge used the R statistical computing and analysis platform for their winning submission. [Read more...]

I got rubber to work with auctex and sweave (Rnw) files with the help of this. Basically, combined with my other stuff, I tweaked my .emacs file to look like: ;;following is AucTeX with Sweave -- works ;;http://andreas.kiermeier.googlepages.com/essmaterials (setq TeX-file-extensions '("Snw" "Rnw" "nw" "tex" "... [Read more...]

The 28th annual JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge race took place a couple of days ago May 21. Participation was down from the record of 23,000 runners set last year at around 17,125. With splendid weather, it is always a nice way to start the Memorial day weekend. We fielded a small but ... [Read more...]

The R journal just published its inaugural peer-reviewed journal. Aligned with the open-source mantra, the journal is free and openly accessible. The journal features short articles on topics focused on R, including notes about new add-on packages, hints for R newcomers, application reports detailing examples of data analysis with R, ... [Read more...]

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Soil Survey Data   Online Querying of NRCS Soil Survey Data Sometimes you are only interested in soils data for a single map unit, component, or horizon. In these cases downloading the entire survey from Soil Data Mart is not worth the effort. An online query mechanism would suffice. The NRCS ... [Read more...]

Western Fresno Soil Hierarchy: partial view of the hierarchy within the US Soil Taxonomic system   Soil Data Field and lab characterization of soil profile data result in the accumulation of a massive, multivariate and three-dimensional data set. Classification is one approach to making sense of a large collection of this ... [Read more...]

Some publishers insist that we embed (include) the fonts in each figure. Here is a set of links regarding this issue for figures produced by R:http://tolstoy.newcastle.edu.au/R/help/05/01/10779.htmlhttps://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2006-October/114... [Read more...]

My fellow bloggers John and Scott have posted recently about the free statistical programming language R.  How does it compare to an expensive language like SAS? If you’ve done any statistical analysis, then you’ll know that getting and cleaning the data is a major step in any project.  ... [Read more...]

The Vanderbilt Kennedy Center is offering a free (repeat, free) one-day introductory course to the R statistical computing language on June 23, taught by Theresa Scott from the department of Biostatistics. You can find contact/registration info at the link below.Vanderbilt Kennedy Center - An Introduction to the Fundamentals & Functionality ... [Read more...]

I found another gem in R today. Earlier I commented about how R could do recursion, something that I love. I write some pretty complicated recursion functions in my research, but I also have a bad habit of compulsively reorganizing things. Now I've c... [Read more...]

  Premise: The current default database back-end used by the GRASS vector model is DBF (as of GRASS 6.5), however this is probably going to be changed (to SQLite) in GRASS 7. The DBF back-end works OK, however it tends to be very sensitive (i.e. breaks) when reserved words occur in column ... [Read more...]

It would appear that debian.org rejected mail for maybe up to twelve hours from late yesterday afternoon (Central timezone) to some time shortly after I got up this morning. Things appear to be back to normal, so a big Thanks to the mail admins. If you happened to have ... [Read more...]

I am always on the lookout for useful data sources for training in statistics, so I am excited that Data.gov has opened for business. The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the US Government. [Read more...]

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To save multiple graphics, e.g, Rplot001.pdf, Rplot002.pdf, …, Rplot050.pdf, we don’t have to call pdf() 50 times (or any similar function). Use “Rplot%03d.pdf” for filename in pdf() and each plot() call will be saved to a new pdf file. Use dev.off() once at the ... [Read more...]

Functional Gradient Descent (FGD) is a method of nonparametric time series analysis, useful in particular for estimating conditional mean, variances and covariances for very high-dimensional time series. FGD is a kind of hybrid of nonparametric statis... [Read more...]

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