Here is an email from Thomas I received yesterday about a computation in our book Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R: I’m currently reading your book “Introduction to Monte Carlo Methods with R” and I quite highly appreciate your work. I’m not able to see how the integral ... [Read more...]

When analyzing a questionnaire, one often wants to view the correlation between two or more Likert questionnaire item’s (for example: two ordered categorical vectors ranging from 1 to 5). When dealing with several such Likert variable’s, a clear presentation of all the pairwise relation’s between our variable can be ... [Read more...]

Dirk Eddelbuettel presented joint work with Romain François on calling C++ from R at the LA R User Group meeting last week. Now, with thanks to Drew Conway of the NY R User Group, video of the presentation is now available. It's also embedded below -- click on it ... [Read more...]

I just added a new video to the R repository, and this one comes from the Los Angeles R Meetup. The folks in LA were fortunate enough to have Dirk Eddelbuettel—renowned R expert and StackOverflow super-user—discuss his joint work with Romain François for interfacing C++ and R ... [Read more...]

The Lapack routine dspsv solves the linear system of equations Ax=b, where A is a symmetric matrix in packed storage format. However, there appear to be no Lapack functions that compute the determinant of such a matrix. We need to compute the determinant, for instance, in order to compute ... [Read more...]

In the last year or so, I’ve been experimenting with different ways of displaying correlation matrices, and have gotten very fond of color-coded correlograms. Here’s one from a paper I wrote investigating the relationship between personality and word use among bloggers (click to enlarge): The rows reflect language ... [Read more...]

The latest version of futile was released to CRAN yesterday. This release broke out the various functions into self-contained sub-packages …Continue reading » [Read more...]

The relatively (to this decade) cool 2008 global temperatures spurred talks of a warming pause, or even global cooling. The claim usually comes from people who cherry picked either data sets and(!)/or start and end points of the global temperature trends to back up their allegation. The blogosphere already has ... [Read more...]

Since my first representation of the rank statistic as paired was incorrect, here is the histogram produced by the simulation perm=sample(1:20) saple[t]=sum(abs(sort(perm[1:10])-sort(perm[11:20]))) when . It is obviously much closer to zero than previously. An interesting change is that the regression of the log-mean ... [Read more...]

How many times have you been disappointed by nice trading system, because neither trading cost or slippage or bid/ask spread were included into back-test results? Did you find difficult to back-test a portfolio in R or many portfolios with different stocks? Blotter package is supposed to solve these problems. ... [Read more...]

I've been using GenABEL for some time now for GWAS analysis using related individuals. It has an excellent set of functions for estimating a kinship matrix from a dense marker panel and then using this in a linear mixed effects model to allow for relat... [Read more...]

While there's been an informal coterie of R users in the Chicago area for some time (notably the fine folks behind the successful R/Finance conferences) there hasn't been a formal R User Group. Until now, that is. JD Long has taken the plunge and announced the new Chicago R ... [Read more...]

Here is my personal list of rules of thumb for people who want to meet some R gurus (quickly) in the R help mailing list ([email protected]): If you want to meet Dr Bill Venables, just say something about Type III Sum of Squares (better if you also mention ... [Read more...]

MATLAB has a nice program called pplane that draws phase planes of differential equations models. pplane on MATLAB is an elaborate program with an interactive GUI where you can just type the model to draw the phase planes. The rest you fidget by clicking (to grab the initial conditions) and ... [Read more...]

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Following a comment from efrique pointing out that this statistic is called Spearman footrule, I want to clarify the notation in namely (a) that the ranks of and are considered for the whole sample, i.e. instead of being computed separately for the ‘s and the ‘s, and then (b) ... [Read more...]

We spent last week in the LA area and had a generally good time out west. I was able to sneak in two talks and a group discussion, thanks to the help by Jan de Leeuw (and everybody at UCLA's Stats department) as well as by Szilard Pafka representing ... [Read more...]

In the puzzle found in Le Monde of this weekend, the mathematical object behind the silly story is defined as a pseudo-Spearman rank correlation test statistic, where the difference between the ranks of the paired random variables and is in absolute value instead of being squared as in the Spearman ... [Read more...]

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Update (April 6 – 2010) : R-Node now has it’s own a website, with a dedicated google group (you can join it here) * * * * The integration of R into online web services is (for me) one of the more exciting prospects in R’s future. That is way I was very excited coming across ... [Read more...]