# Monthly Archives: April 2010

## Summarising data using box and whisker plots

April 25, 2010
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A box and whisker plot is a type of graphical display that can be used to summarise a set of data based on the five number summary of this data. The summary statistics used to create a box and whisker plot are the median of the data, the lower and upper quartiles (25% and 75%)

## How to upgrade R on windows – another strategy (and the R code to do it)

April 23, 2010
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Update: In the end of the post I added simple step by step instruction on how to move to the new system. I STRONGLY suggest using the code only after you read the entire post. Background If you didn’t hear it by now – R 2.11.0 is out with a bunch of new features. After Andrew Gelman recently lamented the lack...

## Some LaTeX Gems – Part 1: TikZ, Loops and more

April 23, 2010
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This logo means that the blog post is about something I have found interesting, but does not apply directly to the exact purpose of this blog. Note: These commands have been tested in pdflatex. I am not sure if they work in other distributions. Over the past couple of months, I have been assisting with editing some papers and also doing...

## Because it’s Friday: Four chords, and the truth

April 23, 2010
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This one's for the musicians out there. (By the way, in my purely anecdotal experience, musical aptitude appears to have a higher-then-expected representation amongst stats folks. I however am the exception that proves the rule, as anyone who's suffered through my Rock Band vocals can attest. But I digress.) What do the chords C#minor, A, E and B have...

## R/Finance 2010 … and unicorns

April 23, 2010
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At the Information Management blogs, Steve Miller has posted a great roundup of last weekend's R/Finance 2010 conference in Chicago. Here's Steve's overall take: This year's conference was even better than the 2009 inaugural, the in-excess-of-200 participants consumed by more than 20 consecutive high-powered presentations over the fast-paced day and a half. And while I'm a quantitative finance welterweight...

## R 2.11.0 just landed…

April 23, 2010
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The new version is here. R version 2.11.0 has been released on 2010-04-22. The source code is first available in this directory, and eventually via all of CRAN. Binaries will arrive in due course (see download instructions above).

## Top 10 Algorithms in Data Mining

April 23, 2010
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The authors here invited ACM KDD Innovation Award and IEEE ICDM Research Contributions Award winners to each nominate up to 10 best-known algorithms in data mining, including the algorithm name, justification for nomination, and a representative public...

## Trouble with ESS and Sweave

April 23, 2010
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Last time I tried to sweave a document from with Emacs+ESS, I was using an earlier version of ESS (the current version is 5.8), and things seemed to be fine. Today when I tried to sweave a simple document and produced PDF output, I got error message of...

## Simple Linear Regression

April 23, 2010
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One of the most frequent used techniques in statistics is linear regression where we investigate the potential relationship between a variable of interest (often called the response variable but there are many other names in use) and a set of one of more variables (known as the independent variables or some other term). Unsurprisingly there

## Fun with the Vasicek Interest Rate Model

April 22, 2010
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$Fun with the Vasicek Interest Rate Model$

A common model used in the financial industry for modelling the short rate (think overnight rate, but actually an infinitesimally short amount of time) is the Vasicek model. Although it is unlikely to perfectly fit the yield curve, it has some nice properties that make it a good model to work with. The