I was recently asked to review a soon to be published book on PostGIS, a spatial extension to the very popular Postgresql relational database. I was very excited about receiving an early copy of this book, as the authors have provided countless tips, ... [Read more...]

R did definitely not start to be THE statistical computing tool. The “two Rs” in far down-under just needed some tool which was not too expensive and structured enough to support the elementary statistics classes filled with hundreds of students. Another constraint was the computing lab which was large enough, ... [Read more...]

Revolution's CEO Norman Nie recently gave an interview to CNET's Dave Rosenberg, who blogs on disrupting the software market. Among the topics covered: What is R (Nie: "R is the most powerful statistical computing language on the planet"), what is predictive analytics ("statistical modeling by another name") and plans for ... [Read more...]

Imprtent update to the post (17.07.10) I now came across David smith’s post on the REvolution blog, pointing to instruction on the R wiki for how to install R on the iPhone! I didn’t try it myself since it both requires jailbreaking the iPhone, and I don’t have ... [Read more...]

Probably the question I get asked the most about R is, "What is R"? It's can be a hard question to answer, because R is so many things. It's data analysis software. It's an environment for data analysis. It's a language. It's an open-source project. It's a community. The Wikipedia ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

I recently have done some empirical studies on zero-coupon bond modelling and pricing, and plan to create an interest rate R package in order to make it re-usable, as I find there are only two R package on it, one is http://cran.r-project.org/web/pack... [Read more...]

...continuing my sloth-like progress through John Verzani's Using R for Introductory Statistics. Previous installments: Chapters 1 and 2 and 3.1. Comparing independent samples Boxplots provide a visual comparison between two or more distributions. Fo... [Read more...]

As promised a few posts ago, another demonstration of the excellent biomaRt package, this time in conjunction with GenomeGraphs. Here’s what we’re going to do: Grab some public microarray data Normalise and get a list of the most differentially-expressed probesets Use biomaRt to fetch the genes associated with ... [Read more...]

I have an entry here about how to install JAGS and rjags in Fedora.  However, I have exchanged emails with Robert Dorazio and Dr. Martyn Plummer.  Here are the easier steps to compile JAGS and install rjags in R. 1. After you extract the source code... [Read more...]

Christopher has the RPMs (for Fedora users) for JAGS, coda, and rjags on his blog. The specific blog entry is here: http://cddesjardins.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/jags-package-for-fedora-13-64-bit/ If you have trouble installing JAGS or rjags in Fedora,... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Continuing in the context of this previous post… 1. Select a static symbol from the R sources, like Connections $ grep "static Rconnection Connections" src/main/connections.c static Rconnection Connections[NCONNECTIONS]; 2. Get its address $ objdump -t `R RHOME`/bin/exec/R | awk '/ Connections/ {print $1}' 000000000093b700 3. Use the symbol __ library(... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

In connection with the Valencia 9 meeting that started yesterday, and with Hedie‘s talk there, we have posted on arXiv a set of comments on particle learning. The arXiv paper contains several discussions but they mostly focus on the inevitable degeneracy that accompanies particle systems. When Lopes et al. state ... [Read more...]

Members of the team met for the second time in 2010, to work on a new interactive graphics canvas for R. The current stage of the project can be found at R-forge: qtinterfaces contains the new canvas, and plumbr contains the new mutable data frame stru... [Read more...]

When you upload a video to YouTube, they don't store a perfect digital copy of your media file. The video is actually re-encoded into the MPEG-4 video format. This saves space on YouTube's servers, but also introduces some random degradation to the video (as a result of the lossy compression ... [Read more...]