Now that Rcpp got updated to 0.8.6, we have an updated RcppArmadillo release containing mostly updates to Conrad's Armadillo version 0.9.70 as well as some more templated sugar magic. RcppArmadillo makes it easy to write highly efficient and highly ... [Read more...]

A while back Steve Mcintyre was looking for a way to handle .Z files in R Ron Broberg over at the whiteboard had an approach that steve adopted both for untar and for uncompressing .Z files.  While the approach is slick, its somewhat of a hack. Nothing wrong with that, ... [Read more...]

The post on the shortcomings of R has attracted a huge number of readers and Ross Ihaka has now posted a detailed comment that is fairly pessimistic… Given the directions drafted in this comment from the father of R (along with Robert Gentleman), I once again re-post this comment as ... [Read more...]

Probably all of us have met the issue of handling missing data, from the basic portfolio correlation matrix estimation, to advanced multiple factor analysis, how to impute missing data remains a hot topic. Missing data are unavoidable, and more encompassing than the ubiquitous association of the term, irgoring missing data ... [Read more...]

iPhone users who have jailbroken their phone have been able to compile R for a while now since they have access to the command line via MobileTerminal.  However, I just recently found out that a package is now up on Cydia to ease installation. So I fired up my iPhone 4 ... [Read more...]

Second Sunday in September -- time for the annual Chicago Half Marathon now in its fourteenth edition (and I have been running it in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 making this and the JPM Chase Corporate Challenge the races I've run ... [Read more...]

It sounds silly, but sometimes you don't want to let people use some arguments of a function. The canonical example is write.csv. The function is effectively a wrapper to write.table, but using "," as the separator and "." as the decimal. [Read more...]

One of the challenges for ecologists working with trophic/interaction networks is to understand their organization. One of the possible approaches is to compare them across a random model, with more or less constraints, in order to estimate the departure from randomness. To this effect, null models have been developed. ... [Read more...]

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al Galili requested in the R-help mailing list for a SyntaxHighlighter brush for the R language, so that WordPress users can highlight their R code easily. I promised to contribute a few minutes on this task, and here is the result: /** * Author: Yihui Xie * URL: http://yihui.name/en/2010/09/syntaxhighlighter-brush-for-the-r-language * ... [Read more...]

A brand new and shiny release of RProtoBuf, now at version 0.2.0, arrived on CRAN earlier today. RProtoBuf provides GNU R bindings for the Google Protobuf data encoding library used and release by Google and others. This is only the second releas... [Read more...]

The last bits of raster are coming together and everything is working so we are getting really close here. Today i will cover the raster function ‘cover’ which robert has just updated to handle a brick function. Lets review the situation with a toy example: First, we read in the ... [Read more...]

The AEC makes this reasonably easy, as do the authors of some very helpful R packages, the good people at Google Maps etc. Full description here (PDF); entire collection here; a sample here, showing Green 1st preferences, by polling places across metro... [Read more...]

R is not supported "out of the box" by EmEditor, so here's a few tips I've found for using it as a great editor for R.Code Syntax highlighting Executing R scripts and capturing outputUse ctags symbols to navigate files.If you create packages for CRAN or like neat code, ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham has just announced the release of a new R package “reshape2” which is (as Hadley wrote) “a reboot of the reshape package”. Alongside, Hadley announced the release of plyr 1.2.1 (now faster and with support to parallel computation!). Both releases are exciting due to a significant speed increase they ... [Read more...]

Yesterday night, we started the  Hierarchical Bayesian Methods in Ecology workshop by trading stories. Everyone involved in the programme discussed his/her favourite dataset and corresponding expectations from the course. I found the exchange most interesting, like the one we had two years ago in Gran Paradiso, because of the ... [Read more...]

In the spur of the moment, I cycled over to Dominican, one of the two small colleges in town, to see if I could snag a remaining ticket to see Billy Bragg perform. Turned out I could, and it became a nice evening out. Darren Hanlon started up the ev... [Read more...]

Dirk released Rcpp 0.8.6 to CRAN Most of the development of this release was trigerred by a question on the Rcpp-devel mailing list. After Richard's question, we added d-p-q-r functions for most of the distributions available in R. The file runit... [Read more...]

The dating site OK Cupid often publishes on their blog interesting analyses of based on the self-reported data from their users, and the latest post is no exception. Most commentary has focused on race/gender preference analysis: according to the "Likes" sections of OK Cupid profiles, white males like "sweaty ... [Read more...]