Ed Burnette makes a point that hits home, with regard to software patents, and how engineers and programmers of modern companies are now being asked to write them: Unfortunately, the joke is on all of us. It’s on our economy, as we let patents choke down innovation and increase ... [Read more...]

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Introduction This week I decided to start unit testing my R code, so I taught myself the bare minimum about the RUnit and testthat packages to be able to use them. Here’s what I found necessary to get started writing tests with both packages. RUnit Basic Example I’m ... [Read more...]

Visualisation of Activity in Afghanistan using the Wikileaks data from Mike Dewar on Vimeo. The latest visualization of the WikiLeaks data compiled by our group is an animation of the intensity of report observations in Afghanistan over the six year period in the WikiLeaks data. Team member Mike Dewar did ... [Read more...]

There's yet another R user group starting, this time in Singapore. Their first meetup is next week, on Wednesday August 25. If you're in Singapore, come along and meet your fellow R users! meetup.com: R User Group - SG [Read more...]

Last Year I introduced you to R Commander, a nice graphical user interface (GUI) for R for those of you who are still hesitant to leave the clicky-box style research a la SPSS for the far more superior reproducible research using R. As most of you know... [Read more...]

I have been using a lot of R lately in my work.  R (main site) is an open source statistical computing platform.  Saying R is only used for statistics does not do it justice.  I am finding it to be a really powerful statistical and optim... [Read more...]

I promised something related to Major League Soccer and here it is.  Caveat:  It’s not much.  Why so sparse?  (1) The data is a bit messy due to teams folding, expansion, name changes, etc.  (2)  I was backpacking all weekend and didn’t have time to work on this side project.  ... [Read more...]

The (excellent!) LearnR blog had a post today about making a rose plot in ggplot2. Following today’s announcement, by Ian Fellows, regarding the release of the new version of Deducer (0.4) offering a strong support for ggplot2 using a GUI plot builder, Ian also sent an e-mail where he shows ... [Read more...]

Cricket is a sport that generates a large volume of performance data and corresponding debate about the relative qualities of various players over their careers and in relation to their contemporaries. The cricinfo website has an extensive database of statistics for professional cricketers that can be searched to access the ... [Read more...]

I just uploaded GillespieSSA 0.5-4 to CRAN. It should be  just a matter of days before it has propagated itself across all mirrors. This release consists of minor revisions with no (intended) changes in functionality. The main change (and it is … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Statistics is computationally intensive. Routine statistical tasks such as data extraction, graphical summary, and technical interpretation all require heavy use of modern computing machinery. Obviously, these tasks can benefit greatly from a paralle... [Read more...]

Ian fellows, a hard working contributer to the R community (and a cool guy), has announced today the release of Deducer (0.4) to CRAN (scheduled to update in the next day or so). This major update also includes the release of a new plug-in package (DeducerExtras), containing additional dialogs and functionality. ... [Read more...]

Usually, intraday volatility exhibits a “smile” – it is high at open and close and it is lower during the trading day. DJI index, 5 min. intervals, CET time: MOS stock, 5 s. intervals, CET time: Because many readers of this blog are trading Nasdaq OMX Baltic stocks, it is worth to share ... [Read more...]

Here's a summary of some things we learnt about applying R to computer performance and capacity planning data in the GDAT Class last week. Neural nets pkg nnet applied to CPU performance data in the Ripley and Venables book (see Section 8.10). How to do stacked plots that Jim calls "spark ... [Read more...]

Excel Charts Blog posted a video tutorial of how to create a circumplex or rose or dougnut chart in Excel. Apparently this type of chart is very popular in the consulting industry, hence the “Consultants’ Chart”. It is very easy to make this chart in Excel 2010, but it involves countless ... [Read more...]

I’m currently planning my wedding, and my fiancée and I were discussing wether there were more or less couples getting married over time. It turns out that this information is quite easy to get via INSEE, a french institute that (…)Read the rest of this entry » [Read more...]

A while ago, a friend of mine needed to download a number of different DNA sequences from Genbank, the online repository for the vast majority of DNA sequences read from all organisms by labs all over the world. This is not a problem. The "ape" package in R has a ... [Read more...]

I see that it’s been over a year since my last post!  I have a backlog of blog post ideas, but something else always seems to have higher priority.   Today, though, I have some interesting (and useful) things to say about R, which I discovered in the last few ... [Read more...]

On some environments, disk space usage can be pretty predictable. In this post, we will see how to do a linear regression to estimate when free space will reach zero, and how to assess the quality of such regression, all using R - the statistical soft... [Read more...]