Over at stats.stackexchange.com recently, a really interesting question was raised about principal component analysis (PCA). The gist was “Thanks to my college class I can do the math, but what does it MEAN?” I felt like this a number of times in my life. Many of my classes ... [Read more...]

Usage of accelerated BLAS libraries seems to shrouded in some mystery, judging from somewhat regularly recurring requests for help on lists such as r-sig-hpc (gmane version), the R list dedicated to High-Performance Computing. Yet it doesn't have to b... [Read more...]

Looking at a project you didn’t touch for years poses many challenges. The less documentation and organization you had in your files, the more time you’ll have to spend tracing back what you did back when the code was written. I just opened up such a project, that ... [Read more...]

We all know that R can do amazing things including 3 dimensional plots. scatterplot3d is probably the most popular package for doing this. But a few days ago I got introduced with rgl package which can do 3 dimensional graphs with some added advantages like we can rotate the plot using ... [Read more...]

There are now four -- count 'em, four -- local R user groups in Australia, with the addition of the latest group in Brisbane, Queensland. GRUB (Group for R Users in Brisbane) is just getting started and doesn't have a meeting scheduled yet, but if you're in the vicinity why ... [Read more...]

The R Function Reference is a mind map that I've created to help novice and intermediate R users perform common tasks and analyses. [Read more...]

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Here is a message sent by the organisers of MCMSki III in Utah next early January. When registering, make sure to tick the free registration for Adap’skiii as well! The fourth joint international meeting of the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics) and ISBA (International Society for Bayesian Analysis), nicknamed “... [Read more...]

Today, Revolution Analytics announced another add-on to R as part of Revolution R Enterprise. RevoDeployR is a Web Services framework for R, designed to make it easy to scalably and securely integrate computations done in R into other applications like spreadsheets and web pages. The idea is simple: as an ... [Read more...]

In a recent question on Stack Overflow about speeding up group-by operations, Marek wondered which functions called .Internal code (and consequently were fast). I was surprised to see that there appears to be no built-in way to check whether or not this is the case (though is.primitive is available ... [Read more...]

In this article I am trying to show how to produce bar plots using R. Many of my friends think SPSS is the most useful software for producing plots and they keep using it (some of them even use Excel!). My goal is to show that R can do every ... [Read more...]

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I connected the instrumentation amplifier described in an earlier post to a piezoelectric transducer (buzzer) and made recordings at 5000 gain. The plot below shows 1000 such measurements over 1.0 seconds. There is a 4.0 second (at 1000Hz) sample of the data here piezo.csv. There is a clear sinusoidal signal in these data ... [Read more...]

Over the two days of the Hierarchical Bayesian Methods in Ecology workshop, we managed to cover normal models, testing, regression, Gibbs sampling, generalised linear models, Metropolis-Hastings algorithms and of course a fair dose of hierarchical modelling. At the end of the Saturday marathon session, we spent one and half discussing ... [Read more...]

Just announced: the next release of R, version 2.12.0, will be released on October 15 (in source code form; binaries usually follow the same day or soon thereafter). Looking at the NEWS file, this release features several dozen tweaks and bug fixes to... [Read more...]

I did some poking and prodding of the polling place data, looking at the way Green support is highly concentrated in the inner-capital cities (and in Melbourne and Sydney, in particular). There are a few interesting exceptions that will make sense to... [Read more...]

Christian Robert posts these thoughts: I [Ross Ihaka] have been worried for some time that R isn't going to provide the base that we're going to need for statistical computation in the future. (It may well be that the future... [Read more...]

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...]