Last time we looked at the Matrix package and dug a little into the chol(), Cholesky Decomposition, function.  I noted that often in finance we do not have a positive definite (PD) matrix.  The chol() function in both the Base and Matrix... [Read more...]

The need to analyze time-series or other forms of streaming data arises frequently in many different application areas.  Examples include economic time-series like stock prices, exchange rates, or unemployment figures, biomedical data sequences like electrocardiograms or electroencephalograms, or industrial process operating data sequences like temperatures, pressures or concentrations.  As a ... [Read more...]

Here are the presentation slides I used for my talk on “Using R for Data Mining Competitions” at Ryerson University as part of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) R User’s Meetup Group. Presentation (Prezi) Presentation (PDF) Meetup Event page Special thanks to Anthony Goldbloom from Kaggle and various competition ... [Read more...]

I follow some 80 odd people/ news sources on my twitter account. For a while I wondered which of these sources are most active on twitter. I picked a simple metric '# of status messages posted to twitter' as the measure of activity. Using R I quickly wrote a program to ... [Read more...]

I analyze a lot of experiments and there are many times when I want to quickly look at means and standard errors for each cell (experimental condition), or the same for each cell and individual-level attribute level (e.g., Democrat, Independent, … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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Only recently I discovered StackOverflow. I know, as a nerd already programming for many years that is quite late. For those who are not familiar with StackOverflow (aka SO), it is a Question and Answer site for programmers. It is… See more › [Read more...]

This is another pretty simple function, written to help me solve the simplest representation of a trivial but tedious task. Most biologist are probably familiar with this task. How many nucleotide differences exist between two given sequences? I only faced the easiest part of the problem, i.e. I do ... [Read more...]

Missing data hinders statistical analyses. Estimating missing values (imputation) prior to analysis is one way to deal with that. In some cases however, the missings need not be estimated at all, since they can be derived with certainty from other … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The Google Open Source Programs Office sponsored me to create the new int64 package that has been released to CRAN a few days ago. The package has been mentionned in an article in the open source blog from Google. The package defines classes i... [Read more...]

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ConPA is an asset allocation application using the classic Markowitz approach. For the calculations the open-source statistical programming language R is used. R scripts are executed on cloudnumbers.com’s computer clusters in the Cloud and the results are displayed by ConPA frontend. ConPA allows to set the investment date ... [Read more...]

Like a lot of other R users I’ve felt the need for sending email from R. I haven’t surveyed CRAN for such a package but looked for the possibility of sending command line email in Windows. Found a nice application called sendEmail that can be found here Below ... [Read more...]

Earlier, I found an interesting post from Bo Allen on pseudo-random vs random numbers, where the author uses a simple bitmap (heat map) to show that the rand function in PHP has a systematic pattern and compares these to truly random numbers obtained from random.org. The post’s results ... [Read more...]

I wrote a simple Backtesting library to evaluate and analyze Trading Strategies. I will use this library to present the performance of trading strategies that I will study in the next series of posts. It is very easy to write a simple Backtesting routine in R, for example: The code ... [Read more...]

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A few days ago, one of my students, Jacopo Primavera (from La Sapienza, Roma) presented his “reading the classic” paper, namely the terrific bounded normal mean paper by my friends George Casella and Bill Strawderman (1981, Annals of Statistics). Even though I knew this paper quite well, having read (and studied) ... [Read more...]

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