RESULTS OF THE GREAT AREA PLOT QUIZ If you are the type of reader who remembers things from last week, you may remember the great area plot quiz we had running. This week, we are excited to announce that the results are in. The plot above shows answers to the ... [Read more...]

Just wanted to create an expression, existing of some mathematical annotation and a value of an R object. Wasn't that intuitive! [Read more...]

Last night at the Bay Area UseR Group meeting, Peter Aldhous, San Francisco Bureau Chief of New Scientist Magazine, gave an inspiring presentation about Data Driven Journalism. Even though the newspaper industry is faltering as a business model, there's a beacon of light: journalists can be the driving force behind ... [Read more...]

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50 days ago (here), I was supposed to be very optimistic about the probability that I could reach a million viewed pages on that blog (over a bit more than two years). Unfortunately, the wind has changed and today, the probability is quite low... ... [Read more...]

I recently noticed the new latticeExtra page on R-forge, which contains many very interesting demos of new lattice-related functionality. There are strong opinions about the "best" graphics system in R (base graphics, grid graphics, lattice, ggplot, et... [Read more...]

Tomorrow I am headed out of town for a few weeks, so posting will be lighter than the usual lightness. My first stop is Chicago, and tomorrow night I will be speaking about my R package for the infochimps API at the Chicago R Users Group. If you are in ... [Read more...]

I use R very frequently and take for granted much that it has to offer.  I forget how R is different from similar tools, so I have trouble communicating the benefits of using R.  The goal of this post is to highlight R's main strengths, but first... my story.How ... [Read more...]

Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, was interested in visualizing the "locality of friendship". Luckily, he has some great data to work with: Facebook's social network of the friendships between its 500 million members. But visualizing that much data can be a challenge in its own ... [Read more...]

In R, the operators “|” and “&” indicate the logical operations OR and AND. For example, to test if x equals 1 and y equals 2 we do the following: __ x = 1; y = 2 __ (x == 1) & (y == 2) [1] TRUE However, if you are used to programming in [...] [Read more...]

I have just completed my first Reproducible Research Compendium "Analysis of the combined survey datasets from the American Red Cross Tsunami Recovery Program Psycho-Social Project (adult community respondents)". It is basically all the repo... [Read more...]

I received recently a comment by FCA (here) who raised an important question, about forecast in dynamic mortality models. (S)he mentioned that from his(her) point of view, the econometric models I considered were "good to predict for the next, say,... [Read more...]

A new package RcppDE has been uploaded in a first version 0.1.0 to CRAN. It provides differential evolution optimisation---a variant of stochastic optimisation that is similar to genetic algorithms but particularly suitable for the floating-point repr... [Read more...]

Just to point out there still is room for more participants to the Adap’skiii workshop! We have now reached 60 participants for this Utah workshop and would welcome more, quite obviously! All participants are also free to present a poster on the evening of the 4th, in the bar. Filed ... [Read more...]

The San Francisco Bay Area ACM runs several courses on data mining and machine learning with R. Machine Learning 101 deals primarily with supervised learning problems, and Machine Learning 102 covers unsupervised learning and fault detection. Machine Learning 101 & 102 were most recently presented by Mike Bowles & Tricia Hoffman in September, and the lecture ... [Read more...]

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As previously mentionedI gave a talk at Melbourne R Users Group titled "Reproducible Research and R Workflow". It covered technologies including LaTeX, Sweave, R, make, Eclipse, and git. This post shares the video. I'd like to thank Pedro Olaya for ... [Read more...]

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The Global Historical Climate Network  (GHCN) is in it’s beta stage. On of the stated goals of the project is to improve the metadata that is provided for the station data.  Over the past few months several independent volunteers have been focusing on the issue of station metadata, each ... [Read more...]

Chapter 4 of Using R for Introductory Statistics gets us started working with multivariate data. The question is: what are the relationships among the variables? One way to go about answering it is by pairwise comparison of variables. Another techniq... [Read more...]