Dataspora recently analyzed Lending Club‘s data in a geographical way using the data distributed by the site. Lending Club is an online financial community that brings together creditworthy borrowers and savvy investors so that both can benefit financially. We replace the high cost and complexity of bank lending with ... [Read more...]

This is a followup to a post I uploaded earlier today about web scraping data off Google Scholar. In that post I was frustrated because I’m not smart enough to use xpathSApply to get the kind of results I wanted. However fast-forward to the evening whilst having dinner with ... [Read more...]

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Avril Coghlan, a lecturer at University College Cork in Ireland, has written and made available for free three books ideal for students or practitioners new to R who want to use it for multivariate analysis, time series analysis or biomedical statistics. Each book begins with practical advice for installing and ... [Read more...]

I do reports for clients with LyX and Sweave. It took me an extremely long time to get them working, but now that they’re working I can do more in an hour and thus charge more per hour. If you’re not familiar, here’s a rundown: LaTeX is ... [Read more...]

This post shows an example on text mining of Twitter data with R packages twitteR, tm and wordcloud. Package twitteR provides access to Twitter data, tm provides functions for text mining, and wordcloud visualizes the result with a word cloud. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I created an R package to read grads data. As far as I know, there is no dedicated package to read grads data. The package is still quite new, any remarks on the documentation or code are more than welcome.… See more › [Read more...]

Setting up AWS Cluster I wanted to setup an AWS cluster to take a shot at a Kaggle contest – DunnHumby Challenge http://www.kaggle.com/c/dunnhumbychallenge For this, I found StarCluster to be of great help. It allows you to set-up AWS nodes in a few lines of code ... [Read more...]

I wanted to scrape the information returned by a Google Scholar web search into an R data frame as a quick XPath exercise. The following will successfully extract  the ‘title’, ‘url’ , ‘publication’ and ‘description’.  If any of these fields are not available, as in the case of a citation, the ... [Read more...]

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The erstwhile big 4 all blanked their opponents last Saturday and a poster on the Guardian wondered when was the previous occasion of such an occurrence. It’s a pretty simple procedure in SQL using a subquery, but in the spirit of learning R, I thought I would tackle the problem ... [Read more...]

The first two consecutive numbers to have two distinct prime factors are: 14 = 2 × 7 Read More: 278 Words Totally [Read more...]

Pentagonal numbers are generated by the formula, Pn=n(3n−1)/2. The first ten pentagonal numbers are: 1, 5, 12, 22, 35, 51, 70, 92, 117, 145, ... Read More: 472 Words Totally [Read more...]

Drawing maps of the polar regions can be done using square spatial maps. A small example says more than a thousand words: xlim = c(-180,180) ylim = c(60,90)   # Some fake grid data dat_grid = expand.grid(x = xlim[1]:xlim[2], y… See more › [Read more...]

What drives the estimates apart? Previously A post by Investment Performance Guy prompted “Variability of volatility estimates from daily data”. In my comments to the original post I suggested that using daily data to estimate volatility would be equivalent to using monthly data except with less variability.  Dave, the Investment ... [Read more...]

Timezone stuff can really drive you NUTS - at least if you’re sitting in front of a German Windows-Box This is what I used to do to set my tz: And I always wondered why R would throw “unknown timezone” warnings: Someday I found out that setting tz via `... [Read more...]

We shall say that an n-digit number is pandigital if it makes use of all the digits 1 to n exactly once; for example, the 5-digit number, 15234, is 1 through 5 pandigital. The product 7254 is unusual, as the identity, 39 × 186 = 7254, containing multiplicand, multiplier, and product is 1 through 9 pandigital. Read More: 488 Words Totally [Read more...]

In England the currency is made up of pound, £, and pence, p, and there are eight coins in general circulation: 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1 (100p) and £2 (200p). Read More: 299 Words Totally [Read more...]

Starting in the top left corner of a 2x2 grid, there are 6 routes (without backtracking) to the bottom right corner. How many routes are there through a 20x20 grid? Read More: 293 Words Totally [Read more...]

The number, 1406357289, is a 0 to 9 pandigital number because it is made up of each of the digits 0 to 9 in some order, but it also has a rather interesting sub-string divisibility property. Let d1 be the 1st digit, d2 be the 2nd digit, and so on. In this way, we note ... [Read more...]