Wes McKinney is a prominent figure in the scientific Python community, and has made tremendous contributions to several core statistical computing libraries in that language. This month, Wes will be speaking specifically about two packages he has crea... [Read more...]

There are many datasets available online for free for research use. Some of them are listed below. - The R Datasets Package: There are around 90 datasets available in the package. Most of them are small and easy to feed … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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Lloyd's is the world's leading specialist insurance market, and is often the first to insure new, unusual or complex risks. So it's no surprise that Lloyd's is one of the many companies that use R and its advanced capabilities for data analysis to help manage its insurance risks. At the ... [Read more...]

Prompted by a rush of visitors from Andrew Gelman's blog, I went back and updated the details of my post from 2009 on reading data from Google Spreadsheets into R. Since then, Google had switched to using a secure (https) connection for Google Docs, which required some tweaks to the code. ... [Read more...]

Note: This post is NOT financial advice!  This is just a fun way to explore some of the capabilities R has for importing and manipulating data. The Financial Times says it's time to "Fire your Adviser" because correlations among US stocks ar... [Read more...]

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Matthias Klose, the tireless force behind the Debian / Ubuntu gcc, python, and what have you packages, sent me a minimal patch to let littler build when the ld linker uses the --as-needed option (as Ubuntu builds now do): all it took was a little reor... [Read more...]

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New version of our 'aqp' package for quantitative soils investigations, available on CRAN (version 0.99-5) and R-Forge (0.99-8). Some of the major changes are listed below: -------------------------- aqp 0.99-8 (2011-09-14) -------------------------- ... [Read more...]

So maybe I’m a strange guy, but I think fork bombs are really funny.  What’s a fork bomb?  The basic premise is that you spawn a process that spawns a process that spawns a process…, ad infinitum. The most beautiful example of a fork bomb, and really one ... [Read more...]

Elijah asked the following via SOCNET mailing list: I was wondering if anyone knew of a script or tool which would give me the network distance of nodes to a particular class of nodes.  I think of this as an Erdos number, except instead of getting the distance to one ... [Read more...]

We've lined up what we think is an amazing series of R-related webinars over the next couple of months. These free 30-60 minute webinars will cover a wide range of topics: big-data analysis in R with the RevoScaleR package, Hadoop and Netezza; introductions to R for SAS users and for ... [Read more...]

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MapReduce is a powerful programming framework for efficiently processing very large amounts of data stored in the Hadoop distributed filesystem. But while several programming frameworks for Hadoop exist, few are tuned to the needs of data analysts who typically work in the R environment as opposed to general-purpose languages like ... [Read more...]

The development version of the read.sas7bdat function (in the sas7bdat package) now reads field labels and formats. In addition, errors of the type "found subheaders where 1 expected" are now a thing of the past. These improvements are largely due to work by Clint Cummins. The function also ... [Read more...]

Note: This post is NOT financial advice!  This is just a fun way to explore some of the capabilities R has for importing and manipulating data.   I recently read a post on ETF Prophet that explored an interesting stock trading strategy in Ex... [Read more...]

Rcpp package co-author Dirk Eddelbuettel provides another case study in speeding up R code by rewriting repeatedly-called R code as inline C++ functions, using the classic Fibonacci recursion algorithm as an example. The speed gains here are impressive -- over 600x compared to native recursive R code -- but you ... [Read more...]

This week's Economist has an in-depth article on the consequences of failures reproducible research, adding more detail to the report in the New York Times in July. Errors in data analysis by researchers at Duke University led to patients in clinical trials being assigned the wrong drug: Dr Potti and ... [Read more...]

Julien Cornebise pointed me to this Guardian article that itself summarises the findings of a Nature Neuroscience article I cannot access. The core of the paper is that a large portion of comparative studies conclude to a significant difference between protocols when one protocol result is significantly different from zero ... [Read more...]