So, there’s probably an easier way to do this (please let me know if you know it)… Suppose you’re working with a system which creates (binary) files and posts them for download on a website. You know the names of the files that will be created. However, they ... [Read more...]

If I come across this kind of code when I'm checking (QCing) code it makes me want to punch the programmer's face. I find that it's impossible to step through and check each dataset with the previous incarnation. Which is how I check what h... [Read more...]

I know know...I've been away again...We (myself and Mark Lake) are presenting a paper at the CECD conference and we have still some to stuff to finish...so I'm really, really busy... I'll post asap a much more detailed post on the conference and o... [Read more...]

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A while back I posted something about scraping a webpage using the BeautifulSoup module in Python.  One of the comments to that post was by Larry — a blogger over at IEORTools — suggesting that I take a look at … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The NIST's The Engineering Statistics Handbook includes an Introduction to Time Series Analysis which provides a great way of demonstrating how R can be used to make such calculations.  This post replicates the analys... [Read more...]

Getting to know the "apply"s in R is extremely handy for using the language efficiently and effectively. Unfortunately, the help files tend to be rather information-dense and are fairly overwhelming for newcomers. A recent blog post by Neil Saunders pr... [Read more...]

PREDICTING CONSUMER BEHAVIOR FROM SOCIAL NETWORKS This week, Decision Science News is doing a special cross-posting with Messy Matters. The post below is by Sharad Goel and describes work that he and your Decision Science News editor Dan Goldstein are jointly undertaking at Yahoo! Do you know what the #$*! your ... [Read more...]

Maria Wolters, self-styled "Science-Mum of two" and speech and language technology researcher, has a great blog post about the one tool she couldn't live without: R. Maria says R is her "favourite tool for analysing experimental results and modelling the resulting patterns of behaviour and preferences", and explains why: R ... [Read more...]

Fresno Area Urban Areas vs Irrigated LCC: grey regions are current urban areas A couple of maps generated from a 1km gridded soil property database, derived from SSURGO data where available with holes filled with STATSGO data. Soil properties visualize... [Read more...]

R packages ‘igraph’ and ‘network’ are good examples of two R packages providing similar but complementary functionalities for which there are a lot of name conflicts. As for now the ‘igraph’ package has a namespace while the ‘network’ package (version 1.4-1) does not. This became an issue when I was ... [Read more...]

A few weeks ago I suddenly reached the point that every graduate student once thought would never come - time to start writing my thesis. With a blank page and a blinking cursor staring me in the face it's time to compile all of my published and unpubl... [Read more...]

So after yesterday’s post on Simple Simulation using Copulas I got a very nice email that basically begged the question, “Dude, why are you making this so hard?” The author pointed out that if what I really want is a Gaussian correlation structure for Gaussian distributions then I could ... [Read more...]

[This article was first published on Rmetrics blogs, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here) Want to share your [Read more...]

Reader P was kind enough to make us a new color map so I promptly played around with it and other parameters. Need to figure out how to drop the labels and ticks on the “map”  map.axes() is no help. In anycase, I had a day long struggle with ... [Read more...]

I’ve had a wonderful summer, very busy, but now I’ve finally had some time to sit down and program some thing on NppToR that I’ve been wanting to get out.  Thanks to Yihui Xie and his wonderful R script for generating auto-completion files, NppToR now has a ... [Read more...]

Econometricians seem to be rather slow to adopt new methods and new technology (compared to other areas of statistics), but slowly the use of R is spreading. I’m now receiving requests for references showing how to use R in econometrics, and so I thought it might be helpful to ... [Read more...]

Earlier this month, Daniel Sabanés Bové and Leo Held posted a paper about g-priors on arXiv. While I glanced at it for a few minutes, I did not have the chance to get a proper look at it till last Sunday. The g-prior was first introduced by the late ... [Read more...]

Toss one hundred different balls into your basket. Shuffle them up and select one with equal probability amongst the balls. That ball you just selected, it’s special. Before you put it back, increase its weight by 1/100th. Then put it back, mix up the balls and pick again. If ... [Read more...]

A friend of mine gave me a call last week and was wondering if I had a little R code that could illustrate how to do a Cholesky decomposition. He ultimately wanted to build a Monte Carlo model with correlated variables. I pointed him to a number of packages that ... [Read more...]