We often see, in publications, a Kaplan-Meier survival plot, with a table of the number of subjects at risk at different time points aligned below the figure. I needed this type of plot (or really, matrices of such plots) for an upcoming publication. Of course, my preferred toolbox was R ... [Read more...]

I like Labor Economics. Partially because it has a nice mix of theory and practical empiricism, but mostly because it seems to be a sub-field with a number of agreed upon stylized facts that grow not out of micro theory … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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Faculty and students of Iowa State University Department of Statistics published online an analysis of the data on 2009 distributions of the US Stimulus funds, aka the Recovery And Reinvestment Act. (The analysis was published in March last year as part of the Design for America competition, but I only recently ... [Read more...]

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Those in the political science discipline probably remember their first encounter with poliscijobrumors.com. For those outside, you have probably never heard of this particular message board, and you would have no reason to. As the URL suggests, the board specializes in rumor, gossip, back-bitting, mudslinging, and the occasional lucid ... [Read more...]

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When we have a statistically significant effect in ANOVA and an independent variable of more than two levels, we typically want to make follow-up comparisons. There are numerous methods for making pairwise comparisons and this tutorial will demonstrate... [Read more...]

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There are situations where we might want to run R on a standalone machine so need to download a (potentially) large number of packages to install on this system. Rather than having to through the pain of searching through CRAN to find the packages and all the dependencies and manually ... [Read more...]

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This first post of the Backtesting in Excel and R series will provide some resources to help smooth the transition from the familiarity and comfort of Excel to the potentially strange and intimidating world of R.I made my voyage from Excel to R more th... [Read more...]

Choropleth Maps are very useful to visualize spatial trends. There have been several blog posts providing detailed instructions on how to create a choropleth map in R using map, spplot and ggplot2. However, I believe that the p... [Read more...]

In data analysis it is often nice to look at all pairwise combinations of continuous variables in scatterplots. Up until recently, I have used the function splom in the package lattice, but ggplot2 has superior aesthetics, I think anyway.Here a fe... [Read more...]

The doSMP package (and its companion package, revoIPC), previously bundled only with Revolution R, is now available on CRAN for use with open-source R under the GPL2 license. In short, doSMP makes it easy to do SMP parallel processing on a Windows box with multiple processors. (It works on Mac ... [Read more...]

Someone at the lab asked how to ‘do something like running means, but with correlations’. I couldn’t find any existing code that would make a good example, so I just wrote some myself. It would be nice to do this without looping. If anyone has a clever way to ... [Read more...]

A few days ago Conrad Sanderson released version 1.1.6 of his Armadillo templated C++ library for linear algebra. Accordingly, I made a new release 0.2.14 of RcppArmadillo, our Rcpp-based integration into R which included a few local fixes. However, ... [Read more...]

Recently on his blog (here), Robin mentioned an amazing book, called "A Million Random Digits" published by RAND corporation. The book was initially published in 1955, but RAND published a nice (and expensive) second edition. A great thing is that ... [Read more...]

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