Once you've downloaded PDQ with a view to solving your performance-related questions, the next step is getting started using it. Why not have some fun with blocks? Fun-ctional blocks, that is. Since all digital computers and network systems can be considered as a collection of functional blocks and these blocks ... [Read more...]

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Last week I was asked to visualise some heart rate data from an experiment. ... The standard way of displaying a time series (that is, a numeric variable that changes over time) is with a line plot. ... The experimenters, however, wanted a bar chart. I hadn't considered this use of a ... [Read more...]

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Peter Aldhous and Jim Giles -- from New Scientist's San Francisco bureau -- are looking for a statistician and R user to take part in an interesting data analysis challenge, and also be part of a future article in the magazine. They were inspired by this rather tongue-in-cheek presentation where ... [Read more...]

The Democratic major-party vote share of US House elections 2002-2008 visualized 5 different ways. [Read more...]

Graphing data with a few outliers is challenging, and some solutions are better than others. Here is a comparison of the alternatives. [Read more...]

I was reading an old post that describes GEOmetadb, a downloadable database containing metadata from the GEO database. We had a brief discussion in the comments about the growth in GSE records (user-submitted) versus GDS records (curated datasets) over time. Below, some quick and dirty R code to examine the ... [Read more...]

This is a follow up to my recent post introducing the use of JAGS in R through the rjags package. In the comments on that post, Bernd Weiss encouraged me to write a short addendum that describes diagnostic functions that you should use to assess the output from an MCMC ... [Read more...]

Once my team of four translators had handed back to me all the chapters of the French version of Introducing Monte Carlo Methods with R to me, I had to go over the book to ensure some minimal consistency between the chapters. I started the editing in the plane to ... [Read more...]

Update: new zip, correcting bug found by Steve  McIntyre: if(!file.exists(HadSST2ncdf)) downloadHADSST2() if(!file.exists(HadSST2ncdf)) downloadHadSST2() issue pending with another line as well. Checking raster versions. I’ve also, added some code into “downloadHadSST2″ that corrects for the “NA” problem with HadSST. (currently commented out). ... [Read more...]

I don’t know how to do this in R. So let me just say why I can’t. I wanted something akin to Boost‘s sub-matrix views, where you can have indexes map back to the original matrix, so you don’t create … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I’m in the middle of a new project that involves analyzing the packages that are currently on CRAN. As part of my work, I could really benefit from information about which packages are installed on people’s computers. If you’re willing to part with a bit of your ... [Read more...]

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Support the OpenGov idea to create a "Platform for number crunchers across (US Federal) government" HERE. A small team is building a small pilot and I'm happy to report that R appears on many of the posts. If you like the idea (or even if you don't),... [Read more...]

Atte Tenkanen had a blog on fractals using R for a time. Much of his source code is still available online.  To produce his version of the Mandelbrot set:source('http://users.utu.fi/attenka/mandelbrot_set.R')Fractals (such... [Read more...]

Ever wondered how a sewing machine seemingly manages to knot stitches without ever releasing the thread? Well, wonder no more: Find this and other animations of marvels of engineering, including the universal velocity joint and the rotary engine, at the link below. World Of Technology: Complicated Mechanisms Explained in simple ... [Read more...]

A recent poll of KD Nuggets readers suggests that of those using SAS today, almost half (49.6%) are considering switching to a different system for statistical analysis. The poll was prompted by the recent high court decision in the UK, that affirmed that "WPS is lawful clone of SAS system" (as ... [Read more...]

R again! You know how in Matlab you can do? S, I = sort(M) I like that. R generic functions makes this possible. First, let’s genericize assignment. I feel like regular “=” and “ [Read more...]

Introduction As many people already know, I’ve recently uploaded a new R package called ProjectTemplate to GitHub and CRAN. The ProjectTemplate package provides a function, create.project(), that automatically builds a directory for a new R project with a clean sub-directory structure and automatic data and library loading tools. ... [Read more...]