The R Graph Gallery, the website from Romain François that showcases hundreds of examples of data visualization with R, has new social features. Now, when you find a graph or chart you find appealing or useful, you can "Like" it on Facebook or "+1" it on Google+. This should be ... [Read more...]

In response to my last post, “The Long Tail of the Pareto Distribution,” Neil Gunther had the following comment:            “Unfortunately, you've fallen into the trap of using the ‘long tail’ misnomer. If you think about it, it can't possibly be the length of the tail that sets distributions like Pareto ... [Read more...]

Just what is Data Science, anyway? Here's one take: Ever since the term "Data Scientist" was coined by DJ Patil and Jeff Hammerbacker in 2009, there's been a vigorous debate on what the team actually means. More than 80% of statisticians consider themselves data scientists, but Data Science is more than just ... [Read more...]

While reading UseR conference abstracts I came across this sentence: "Sugarcane is polypoid, i.e., has 8 to 14 copies of every chromosome, with individual alleles in varying numbers." Vau! This generates really complex genotype system. Say we have biallelic gene with alleles being A and B. In diploids the possible genotypes ... [Read more...]

Pierre Pudlo and I worked this morning on a distribution related to philogenic trees and got stuck on the following Bessel integral where In is the modified Bessel function of the first kind. We could not find better than formula 6.611(4) in Gradshteyn and Ryzhik. which is for a=0… Anyone in ... [Read more...]

This is an illustration of representing point count in a graphic using transparency. This is easy to do in ggplot2 if you use one of the barchart type of geoms.  However I think there are other situations where it would be useful to apply aesthetics based on point count. Since ... [Read more...]

Today is the World Tourism Day! So let’s speak about some tourism related datasets – and others. Among other nice functions, Google offers a Public Data Explore in a beta version which provides a collection of datasets from OECD, IMF, Eurostat, … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Looks like there's been a lot of activity in the R user community in the Northern hemisphere now that the summer break is over. I've just added several new groups to the Local R User Group Directory: Tokyo, Japan: The Tokyo.R R study group has already had 17 meetings, but ... [Read more...]

The pgf drawing package for LaTeX provides facilities for drawing simple of complicated pictures within a LaTeX document. There are many options available within the package and in this post we consider some of the basics to get up and running. Fast Tube by Casper As with all LaTeX documents ... [Read more...]

ggplot2 is a package for R which easily draws plots that are easier on the eyes than R’s built-in plotting functions, though the grammar is different than what is commonly used in R. This code demonstrates how to prepare a … Continue reading → [Read more...]

My R package, R/qtl, contains about 33k lines of R code (and 21k lines of C code). Some of it is quite good; some of it is terrible. Here’s another example of the terrible. I’ve long needed to revise the function scantwo, for performing a two-dimensional genome ... [Read more...]

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Barack Obama is recruiting analysts for his 2012 re-election campaign. It is to analyze the campaign’s data to guide election strategy and develop quantitative, actionable insights that drive decision-making. R is mentioned as one of the tools to use. Analytics … Continue reading → [Read more...]

fMRI data from 90 locations in the brain look somewhat like daily closing prices on 116 stocks if you squint just right. Marginal Revolution was nice enough to point to “Topological isomorphisms of human brain and financial market networks”. I’ve only just glanced through the paper.  I find it interesting, but ... [Read more...]

If you look at the programming languages that are popular these days, a few patterns emerge. I'm not talking about languages that have the most hits on the job sites. I'm talking about what the cool kids are coding in - the folks that hang out on hacke... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics today announced that it has partnered with Cloudera, the leader in Apache Hadoop-based software and services, to make big-data analytics with Hadoop and R available to Revolution R Enterprise users. As we announced earlier this month, we have created three open-source R packages which make it possible for ... [Read more...]

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Although this was only a half-day of talks, the third day of the workshop was equally thought-challenging and diverse.  (I managed to miss the ten first minutes by taking a Line 3 train to 125th street, having overlooked the earlier split from Line 1… Crossing south Harlem on a Sunday morning is ... [Read more...]

I discuss how to use Inkscape to easily shift around labels on graphs produced in R. Continue reading → [Read more...]