Yesterday's US election is pretty much over now: most of the results are in, the pundits have offered their political analysis, and there's even been a bit of mathematical analysis of the results, too. But last night as the results were flowing in, R user Brock Tibert just wanted to ... [Read more...]

Since I got the same question twice, let us look at it quickly....  Some students show me a graph (from a Poisson regression) which looks like that, and they asked "isn't it weird ?", i.e."residuals are null or positive... this is not what we... [Read more...]

At proMENTE social research we often use the odfWeave and Sweave packages for the amazing statistics program R for automating the production of graphics and reports. odfWeave and Sweave are for the OpenOffice and lyx (www.lyx.org) word proce... [Read more...]

A bug-fix release 0.3.7 of inline is now on CRAN and at Debian. It fixes a minor bug: when package.skeleton() was called to convert one or more functions created with this package into a package, the corner case of just a single submitted function ... [Read more...]

A bug-fix release 0.8.8 of Rcpp is now available. It is awaiting processing at CRAN, and will be uploaded to Debian once processed at CRAN. In the meantime, sources are available from my local directory here. This release follows on the heels o... [Read more...]

Following up on the story from last week, where SAS CEO Jim Goodnight said he "hadn't noticed" competition from open-source alternatives, open-source BI vendor Pentaho's "Chief Geek" James Dixon responds: What this means is that SAS has moved from the Igorance phase to the Ridicule phase of battling open source, ... [Read more...]

The only thing I remember from courses I had in probability a few years ago is that we also have to clearly defined the event we want to calculate the probability. On the Freakonomics blog, last week, the Israeli lottery was mentioned (here, see a... [Read more...]

After running a spatial data analysis with R session today, it became apparent that there are one or two teething problems installing the important rgdal package on Mac OS X operating systems. The usual install.packages(“rgdal”) won’t work. My colleague Jon Reades did some digging around to find ... [Read more...]

Keith Briggs published a post here on names of English place name element distribution, which contains almost twenty maps like the one where names ends by -bourn,bourne,burn (here) or -head (there). Actually, it is possible (Robin mentioned that a... [Read more...]

A short update on network+intergraph R packages story: Couple of days ago Carter Butts released a new version of the ‘network’ package (ver. 1.5-1). It has a namespace now. Consequently, the ‘intergraph’ package should work out-of-the-box. There is no need to install my hacked version of the ‘network’ package ... [Read more...]

If you need to generate synthetic wind speed time series, you may find useful the procedure described in  “A Markov method for simulating non-gaussian wind speed time series” by G.M. McNerney and P.S. Veers (Sandia Laboratories, 1985), and “Estimation of extreme wind speeds with very long return periods” by ... [Read more...]

There are many implantation in R already of ROC plots (e.g. in the packages PresenceAbsence, ROCR). I just wrote my own very simple script just to get a better understanding of it. [Read more...]

In previous posts (here and here) we created a simple function that returns a single numeric value. In some situations it may be more useful to return a more flexible data type, such as a list object, to provide more information about the calculations that have been performed. We can ... [Read more...]

As noted on the Google Open Source Blog last week, R package authors Dirk Eddelbuettel and Romain Francois recently gave a presentation on R at the Googleplex, on various topic related to "bridging" R into other systems. Their 90-minute talk is available for replay on YouTube (as part of the ... [Read more...]

In the last six months or so, the behemoth of Q & A sites stackoverflow, decided to change tack and launch a number of other non-computing-language sites. To launch a site in the stackoverflow family, sites have to spend time gathering followers in Area51. Once a site has gained a critical ... [Read more...]

NuPoP Nucleosome positioning predictionMulcom Differential expression and false discovery rate calculation through multiple comparisonontoCAT Ontology parsingBHC Bayesian Hierarchical ClusteringiSeq Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling of ChIP-seq... [Read more...]

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Today, I will try to change the labels of the x and y axis. [Read more...]

Noise can be classified as pollution and lawmakers often (always?) treat it as such. Noise can have different origin points, point source being among the simplest to model. Because noise has broader health implications, being able to understand its propagation, a simple model can further our understanding in toning down ... [Read more...]

Having always appreciated the red and blue cartograms and cartographs of geographic electoral preferences, such as those made available by Mark Newman, I sought to produce similar maps, but include information about support for non-“state-sponsored” parties, and to extend the coverage back in time. I was able to find ... [Read more...]