Barry Rowlingson gave an interesting talk at UseR 2011, “Why R-help must die!” He suggested the Q-and-A type sites Stack Overflow (on programming) and Cross Validated (on statistics), both part of Stack Exchange. An interesting feature of these sites is that, in addition to voting up and down on the questions ... [Read more...]

Teacher: “How variable is your estimate of the mean?” Student: “Uhhh, it’s not. I took a sample and calculated the sample mean. I only have one number.” Teacher: “Yes, but what is the standard deviation of sample means?” Student: “What do you mean means, I only have the one ... [Read more...]

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We are using a Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) for the Gold Compound selection task by the ToxBank in the SEURAT-1 cluster, funded by Colipa and the EC. I do stress that despite being funded by Colipa, they have no control over my research; they just co-... [Read more...]

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At the FlowingData blog, data visualization commentator and Visualize This author Nathan Yau lists 5 misconceptions about visualization: Software does everything (Nathan notes "Personally, I use a lot of R and have a lot of fun in Illustrator", but uses a lot of other tools as well.) Visualization is for making ... [Read more...]

It is good to see forecasting algorithms getting some mainstream exposure on ABC Catalyst. [Read more...]

The following script simulates a craps game in R any number of iterations with any starting amount of cash and any maximum odds and running until the user is out of cash.  It assumes a specific betting strategy as explained … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I've just created a facebook page about the R Graph Gallery I hope this will improve the experience of the website by making it more social, for example, I anticipate that people will share their own graphs by sending a picture on the facebook ... [Read more...]

At 2:42PM on March 10 2010, without warning, the Dow Jones Industrial Index plunged more than 1000 points in just 5 minutes. It remains the biggest one-day decline in this stock market index in history. On an intra-day basis, anyway: by the end of the day, the market had regained 600 points of the drop. ... [Read more...]

So ... there's clearly a lot of interest in integrating R and Hadoop. Today's webinar was a record-setter for Revolution Analytics, with more than 1000 people signing up to learn how to access Hadoop data from R with the packages from the open-source RHadoop project. If you didn't catch the live webinar, ... [Read more...]

My programming experience progressed mostly along the lines of: C, C++, shell, Java, Java, Ruby, Python, Java, Java. Only recently have I started exploring the likes of Haskell, Erlang and R. Well that evolution bit me a little while back when I tried ... [Read more...]

A new version of the digest package (which generates hash function summaries for arbitrary (and possibly nested) R objects using any of the standard md5, sha-1, sha-256 or crc32 algorithms) is now on CRAN. Bryan Lewis, who is doing very stuff with ... [Read more...]

I’m headed back home from Strangeloop 2011 this morning. Once again I booked an early flight so was up at 4:45 to get to the airport (when will I learn?) The conference was a smashing success as far as I am concerned. It was extremely well run and the talks were ... [Read more...]

At JSM, John Kimmel gave me a copy of the Handbook of Markov chain Monte Carlo, as I had not (yet?!) received it. This handbook is edited by Steve Brooks, Andrew Gelman, Galin Jones, and Xiao-Li Meng, all first-class jedis of the MCMC galaxy. I had not had a chance ... [Read more...]

Following up on yesterday's post about facebook like box, I've added some more social things into the gallery. The main page gains a google plus "plus one" button, and each graph page now has a +1 button, a facebook like button, and a facebook comm... [Read more...]

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During the UseR 2011 conference I saw lots of examples of the use of RPanel to create a GUI in R. Yesterday, because I was a bit bored of the work I was doing I started thinking about this and I decided to try this package.My objective was to create ... [Read more...]