As a matter of convention, we usually run 3 or 4 chains in JAGS. By default, this gives rise to chains that draw samples from 3 or 4 distinct pseudorandom number generators. I didn’t go and check whether it does things 111,222,333 or 123,123,123, but in any event the “parallel chains” in JAGS are samples [...] [Read more...]

Earlier this week, Conrad Sanderson issued a minor bug fix release 2.0.2 of his Armadillo library which provides templated C++ code for linear algebra. We wrapped that into a new RcppArmadillo release 0.2.26 and shipped it to CRAN. Due to it being su... [Read more...]

Argument passing via ... is a great feature of the R language, allowing you to write wrappers around existing functions that do not need to list all the arguments of the wrapped function. ... is used extensively in S3 methods … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I’ve succeeded in getting a version of RomanM and JeffId’s Thermal hammer working with version 1.3 of RghcnV3. This is going to be a long post because there is a lot of ground to cover. First, some errata, the “Globe” demo in V1.3 appears to have a missing line, ... [Read more...]

For our forthcoming book on machine learning for hackers, John Myles White and I will discuss clustering, and various methods for doing so. One common method for clustering observations [...] [Read more...]

Earlier this month Thomas Dinsmore, solutions architect for IBM Netezza’s Advanced Analytics team, had a great blog post on why companies should embrace R as an analytics platform. He says: There are three main reasons R should be part of your enterprise analytics architecture: R has capabilities not available ... [Read more...]

R isn't just about serious things like model inference and prediction intervals and big analytics. Sometimes, R lets its hair down and just does weird and wonderful things because ... well just because. For example, with a package from Paulo Sonego, it can display your favourite XKCD cartoon: __ install.packages("RXKCD", ... [Read more...]

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The puzzle of last weekend in Le Monde was about finding the absolute rank of x9 when given the relative ranks of x1,….,x8 and the possibility to ask for relative ranks of three numbers at a time. In R terms, this means being able to use or yet being ... [Read more...]

TU Dortmund professor Uwe Ligges is now a member of R-core, the group of 20 leading statisticians and computer scientists who oversee the R Project and develop and maintain the source code for the R engine and its core packages. Uwe has been very active in the R project for many ... [Read more...]

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I'm putting together my presentation for useR! 2011 titled "Experimenting with a tty connection for R". Hence, I've updated the tty connection patch to work with R versions 2.13.0 and 2.13.1. And, instead of re-listing the patch files and re-writing instructions on their application, I've devoted a small portion of my Code page ... [Read more...]

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Something I have been doing a lot of work with recently are time series data, to which I have been fitting additive models to describe trends and other features of the data. When modelling temporally dependent data, we often need … Continue reading → [Read more...]

R reminds me a lot of English. It’s easy to get started, but very difficult to master. So for all those times I’ve spent… well, forever… trying to figure out the “R way” of doing something, I’m glad to share these quick wins. My recent R tutorial ... [Read more...]

While high-speed fish feeding videos may be the signature of the lab, dig a bit deeper and you’ll find a wealth of comparative phylogenetic methods sneaking in.  It’s a natural union — expert functional morphology is the key to good comparative methods, just as phylogenies hold the key to ... [Read more...]

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I gave a talk at the Interface Symposium on reproducible research in practice. I went first in the session, so the slides have a bit more background and philosophy. It was a great session; one of Jon Claerbout's colleagues spoke, Sergey Fomel, a founding author of Madagascar; Sorin Mitran from ... [Read more...]

Kickstarter, a social funding platform where individuals can chip in cash to get a worthy project going, just celebrated their 10,000th kickstarted project. Kickstart employee Fred Benenson recognized the achievement by visualizing the funding of music, design, art, game and many other kinds of projects using R and ggplot2. For ... [Read more...]

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