I read this article by Rivka Galchen on quantum computing. Much of the article was about an eccentric scientist in his fifties named David Deutch. I’m sure the guy is brilliant but I wasn’t particularly interested in his not particularly interesting life story (apparently he’s thin and ... [Read more...]

Time to horrify some people. First let's include the code we wrote last time, __ source("pretend.R") and the dependency-tracking environment it creates will be used to run all the following examples. Let's look at, I don't know, I'm just trying to demonstrate a language feature so uh... band-pass filtering ... [Read more...]

I have something a fondness for ridiculous variable names, so it’s useful to be able to check whether my latest concoction is legitimate. More so if it is automatically generated. Not having an is_valid_variable_name function is one of those odd omissions from R, and the assign ... [Read more...]

Best graph ever. LARGEST EVER DIFFERENCE BETWEEN 328 and 327 SPOTTED IN NEW YORK CITY [Read more...]

I want to learn the heavy-weight of Statistical softwares - SAS. It seems like the default choice for high-end statistics and I want to understand why.I'm working in the healthcare practice in our firm and want to analyze claims and credit data (Teraby... [Read more...]

The blog The Average Investors Blog R posted a nice report about accelerating a default Debian R installation and added some details about his benchmarks in the comment section [Read more...]

As a statistician, I was trained to think of randomized experimentation as representing the gold standard of knowledge in the social sciences, and, despite having seen occasional arguments to the contrary, I still hold that view, expressed pithily by Box, Hunter, and Hunter (1978) that “To find out what happens when ... [Read more...]

The analysis of geospatial information is currently a big trend in medicine and public health. Even though some may want to convince you that this can only be achieved with the latest and most expensive software, I am not convinced. First, analysis  of spatial data dates back to at least 1856 ... [Read more...]

Today I had one of those special moments that is uniquely associated with R. One of my colleagues was trying to solve what I term an 'Excel problem'. That is, one where the problem magically disappears once a programming language is employed. Put simpl... [Read more...]

I write code mainly in R, and from times to times, in C, C++, SAS, bash, python, and perl. There are style guides out there that help make your code more consistent and readable to yourself and others. Here is a style guide for C++, and here is Google’s ... [Read more...]

Kaggle has released a new data-mining challenge: use data from 10 years of Wikipedia edits in order to predict future edit rates. The dataset has been anonymized in order to obscure editor identity and article identity, simultaneously adding focus to the challenge and robbing the dataset of considerable richness. I have ... [Read more...]

B*tchin’ six dimensional 6-cube. The rainbow colours and glass panes really help this visualisation.  Examples of 6-dimensional things If it’s hard to envision 6 dimensions, consider this: the possible tunings of a guitar constitute a 6-dimensio... [Read more...]

If you're looking for connections with expertise in R programming, the new Skills and Expertise feature on LinkedIn makes it easy. Just visit the R Skills page for a list of R practitioners on LinkedIn. You can also add "R" to your own list of skills from the same page. ... [Read more...]

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A friend of mine brought my attention recently to the fact that the default R install is way to generic and thus sub-optimal. While I didn’t go all the way rebuilding everything from scratch, I did find a few cheap steps one can do to help things a little. ... [Read more...]

(Re-posted from a post made by Hadley Wickham to the [R-pkgs] mailing list) # About the stringr package Strings are not glamorous, high-profile components of R, but they do [Read more...]

A couple years ago Rod Little was invited to write an article for the diamond jubilee of the Calcutta Statistical Association Bulletin. His article was published with discussions from Danny Pfefferman, J. N. K. Rao, Don Rubin, and myself. Here it all is.I'll paste my discussion below, but it's ... [Read more...]

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Following a series of pre-releases, Armadillo version 2.0.0 was announced by Conrad Sanderson earlier in the week. As it happens, it contained another minor build regression so version 2.0.1 followed the next day. We created versions 0.2.24 and 0.2... [Read more...]