December 2010

Some problems with the Mexican mortality database

December 22, 2010 | Diego Valle-Jones

I've written before about how I couldn't find the Acteal Massacre in the homicide database available at the INEGI. So I decided to check if the deaths that occurred as a consequence of the massacre were misclassified as other types of violent death, and indeed they were. In the municipality ... [Read more...]

A plea for consistent style!

December 22, 2010 | Nick Horton

As we get close to the end of the year, it's time to look back over the past year and think of resolutions for 2011 and beyond. One that's often on my mind relates to ways to structure my code to make it clearer to others (as well as to myself ...
[Read more...]

Forbes: R is a name you need to know in 2011

December 22, 2010 | David Smith

The December 20 issue of Forbes magazine, on newsstands now, includes a column about R on page 128 as part of the "Name You Need to Know in 2011" feature. It's basically an excerpt from this blog post by Steve McNally and its comments, and includes quotes from Norman Nie of Revolution Analytics, ... [Read more...]

A Special Graphics Device in R: the Null Device

December 22, 2010 | Yihui Xie

It is well-known that R has several graphics devices — either the screen devices (X11(), windows(), …) or the off-screen devices (pdf(), png(), …). We can query the default graphics device in options(): getOption('device') In a non-interactive session, the default device is pdf(). This is why Sweave has to create a file ... [Read more...]

Oil – Natural Gas Cointegration – turning point?

December 22, 2010 | Lloyd Spencer

Much has been written and said about the NG / CL relationship.  For most of 2009 pundits touted NG as historically underpriced relative to CL.  As always the reality is more complex.  Comparing a largely domestic USD commodity with an internationally traded commodity increasingly consumed by emerging markets has inherent risks.More ... [Read more...]

Data-driven arterial input functions

December 22, 2010 | Brandon Whitcher

I haven't devoted any time/effort/code to the extraction and parameter estimation of arterial input functions (AIFs) for DCE-MRI in either the vignette or the submission to JSS.  Frankly, I wanted to communicate the main features of the R package dcemriS4 and data-driven AIFs just haven't made the list... ... [Read more...]

RcppExamples 0.1.2

December 22, 2010 | Thinking inside the box

A new version of our RcppExamples, package is now on CRAN. RcppExamples contains a few illustrations of how to use Rcpp. It grew out of documentation for the classic API (now in its own package RcppClassic) and we added more functions documenting... [Read more...]

CrossValidated Journal Club

December 21, 2010 | Rob J Hyndman

Journal Clubs are a great way to learn new research ideas and to keep up with the literature. The idea is that a group of people get together every week or so to discuss a paper of joint interest. This can happen within your own research group or department, or ... [Read more...]

Questions on the parallel Rao-Blackwellisation

December 21, 2010 | xi'an

Pierre Jacob and I got this email from a student about our parallel Rao-Blackwellisation paper. Here are some parts of the questions and our answer: Although I understand how the strategy proposed in the paper helps in variance reduction, I do not understand why you set b=1 (mentioned in Section 3.2) ... [Read more...]

How Orbitz uses Hadoop and R to optimize hotel search

December 21, 2010 | David Smith

Positional bias — the tendency for users to preferentially select results in the first few positions of a search — is a big issue for all kinds of search engines. But for online travel site Orbitz the stakes are higher than for a traditional Web search engine: if a customer chooses the ... [Read more...]

NppToR 2.5.2 Improves startup

December 21, 2010 | R Blog

I’ve been getting lots of feedback that there are problems starting NppToR with some of the latest version. I took to the task of looking at that yesterday on the train home. I have made improvements to the way NppToR finds the RHome directory, not relying entirely on the ... [Read more...]

R programming books

December 21, 2010 | csgillespie

My sabbatical is rapidly coming to an end, and I have to start thinking more and more about teaching. Glancing over my module description for the introductory computational statistics course I teach, I noticed that it’s a bit light on recommend/background reading. In fact it has only two ... [Read more...]

A Very Data Christmas

December 21, 2010 | Drew Conway

This week Google announced its Ngram Viewer, which allows you to explore the use of words in thousands of texts overtime, going back two hundred years. Given the relatively long time period covered by this massive data set, it is fun to explore how language has changed overtime. Some texts, ...
[Read more...]

oro.nifti 0.2.4

December 21, 2010 | Brandon Whitcher

The R package oro.nifti contains functions for the input/output and visualization of medical imaging data that follow either the ANALYZE, NIfTI or AFNI formats.  This package is part of the Rigorous Analytics bundle.Orthographic display of stru... [Read more...]

Back from Philly

December 20, 2010 | xi'an

The conference in honour of Larry Brown was quite exciting, with lots of old friends gathered in Philadelphia and lots of great talks either recollecting major works of Larry and coauthors or presenting fairly interesting new works. Unsurprisingly, a large chunk of the talks was about admissibility and minimaxity, with ...
[Read more...]

Michael Kane on Bigmemory

December 20, 2010 | Josh Paulson

Handling big data sets has always been a concern for R users. Once the size of the data set reaches above 50% of RAM, it is considered “massive” and can literally become impossible to work with on a standard machine. The bigmemory project, by Michael Kane and Jay Emerson, is one ... [Read more...]
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