Here is a quick analysis of the relationship between SAT score and student retention. The data is from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and analyzed using R. This was a quick analysis and would be careful about making any strong conclusions. The source for running this analysis along ... [Read more...]

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Reconstructing phylogenies is an interesting task, sadly one that often requires to navigate between a multitude of software. To add an unnecessary layer of complexity to the whole thing, most of these softwares speaks different languages, and requires the user to do endless conversions from fasta to phylip to nexus ... [Read more...]

There are two major threats to complex MCMC estimations:Wrong energy settings (hibernate after 2 hours of inactivity)Automatic Updates (install updates at 3 a.m.)I thought about the latter threat. At times, you may hand some R code to other co-workers,... [Read more...]

My favorite text editor on Windows is Ultraedit, but it does not have a nice interface to R in the same vein as Emacs/ESS, Tinn-R, or Eclipse. (I have never used Eclipse.) Ultraedit is powerful enough to submit whole R programs... [Read more...]

If you use odfWeave to produce figures, you will probably find they jump about when scrolling through the document – because the figures and figure frames are anchored in openoffice to the paragraph and not “as character”. ... [Read more...]

Most of the statistics work I do now is reproducible research - this can offer a big advantage for clients but of course that doesn't necessarily mean they realise it ... Below is a text we have been pasting in at the bottom of the source d... [Read more...]

But modeling devices that make sense for an unbiased decisionmaker may not make sense for a biased one. For example, why would individuals have priors and posteriors if they are destined to apply Bayes’ law incorrectly?1 A question I often ask myself. Wolfgang Pesendorfer : Behavioral Economics Comes of Age: A ... [Read more...]

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Last week, during the workshop on Statistical Methods for Meteorology and Climate Change (here), I discovered how powerful bayesian techniques could be, and that there were more and more bayesian statisticians. So, if I was to fully understand app... [Read more...]

The cat function bugs me a little. There are two quirks in particular that I find irritating on occasions that I use it. Firstly, almost everything that I want displayed onscreen, I want on its own line. __ cat("cat messes up my command prompt position") cat messes up my command ... [Read more...]

Last week, I began talking about using the base graphics in R. Those graphics were pretty bland, and my hope for the next two posts is to introduce some interesting additions to the basic graphics that come from R: color, legends, lines, shapes, multiple graphs side-by-side, text, point types, and ... [Read more...]

Rob Calver wrote an interesting invitation on the R mailing list today, inviting potential authors to submit their vision of the next great book about R. The announcement originated from the Chapman & Hall/CRC publishing houses, backed up by an impressive team of R celebrities, chosen as the editors of ... [Read more...]

I am happy to report that ByteMining is listed on “40 Fascinating Blogs for the Ultimate Statistics Geek“! Some of the ones that I frequently read, or are written by Twitter friends/followers (in no particular order): R-bloggers, an aggregate site containing blog posts tagged as posts about R. High quality ... [Read more...]

useR! 2011[*], the annual R user conference supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing, will be held this year in the United Kingdom at the University of Warwick (which is located, oddly enough, in Coventry). Last year's conference featured dozens of presentations on R's use in pretty much every domain ... [Read more...]

A few days after my R exam (available in French here), I received this email from the department secretary: Pour information cet étudiant est venu me trouver jeudi soir, catastrophé car il venait de constater que son stylo “PILOT Frixion”, stylo semble-t-il recommandé par certains enseignants, ne se contentait pas ... [Read more...]

pgfSweave 1.1.3 is now on CRAN. This release adds a few new features and fixes some bugs The pesky Rplots.pdf file is not generated anymore Brand new vignette by Hans Ekbrand on the use of pgfSweave with large data sets based on this site. New example on using caching by ... [Read more...]

The family of Rcpp packages just grew by one: the first 0.1.0 release of RcppBDT is now on CRAN. RcppBDT stands for Rcpp Boost Date_Time. It employs what we call Rcpp modules: a mechanism which provides easier ways to expose C++ functions and classe... [Read more...]

Coronary artery disease (CAD) results in blockages to the blood vessels that supply the heart and, if left untreated, can lead to heart attacks and even death. In fact, CAD is the leading cause of death in North America and many other countries. It's important to detect CAD as soon ... [Read more...]

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