Gapminder has posted an interesting chart using world development indicators from the World Bank. I thought it would be a good exercise to recreate this chart using R and ggplot2. While playing with the data, not log transforming GDP provides some interesting, and perhaps different, interpretation. The R script and ... [Read more...]

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In my last sab-R-metrics post, I went over some basics of calling data and creating vectors or new data from those. Here, I want to extend that to full subsets of data and go on to use some of the basic functions in R so that we can begin plotting ... [Read more...]

New in nerdery this week, it’s now a bit easier to install the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences that I put together (based on lots of great work by Phil Hagelberg and, more recently, Eric Schulte). In the past, the fact that AucTeX was both necessary and ... [Read more...]

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The table function in R is very useful, especially when working with survey data. Often you may have Likert scales for levels of agreement or satisfaction. table() quickly gives the distribution of answers, which can then be used for (bar)plots.However... [Read more...]

When using Windows Vista / 7, Windows' User Account Control can be annoying. When is R going to be Windows 7 ready, asking for elevated priviliges only when needed? I guess the problem lies in the structure of packages.Running Rgui.exe "as Administrato... [Read more...]

The release of the R package “googleVis” has made the production of interactive maps through Google’s Chart Tools a simple task. Ignoring the some basic data manipulation the below map... [Read more...]

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There are six places left for the forecasting workshop I am giving in Switzerland in June. If you were thinking of going, book in fast! [Read more...]

Following the presentation of the first Le Monde puzzle of the year, I tried a simulated annealing solution on an early morning in my hotel room. Here is the R code, which is unfortunately too rudimentary and too slow to be able to tackle n=1000. #minimise \sum_{i=1}^I x_... [Read more...]

If you're looking to apply massively parallel resources to an R problem, one of the most time-consuming aspects of the problem might not be the computations themselves, but the task of setting up the cluster in the first place. You can use Amazon Web Services to set up the cluster ... [Read more...]

One of the reasons that I don’t often take advantage of the cool features in Revolution R is that I absolutely can’t stand their Visual Studio interface. Previously, if I wanted to run something in RevoR, I fired up the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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JD Long's experimental segue package makes it easy to use Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service to fire up a Hadoop cluster and use it for non-Big Data, computationally-intensive tasks. The package provides a cluster-aware version of lapply() which "just works". [Read more...]

I frequently occupy computers everywhere with extensive MCMC tasks. Installing R doesn't take long, but it can be very annoying if you manually have to install dozens of R packages before your code is able to run. Well, now I use the following command ... [Read more...]

If you do MCMC with R, you probably know how nasty "bookkeeping" of draws can be. So I quickly coded up a small function which does everything for you. Every parameter has to begin with "mcmc_" or another to-be-defined string, then just run mcmcsave... [Read more...]

I thought it would be trivial to extract the p-value on the F-test of a linear regression model (testing the null hypothesis R²=0). If I fit the linear model: fit [Read more...]