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The “Minimum Correlation Algorithm” is a term I stumbled at the CSS Analytics blog. This is an Interesting Risk Measure that in my interpretation means: minimizing Average Portfolio Correlation with each Asset Class for a given level of return. One might try to use Correlation instead of Covariance matrix in ... [Read more...]

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And now for something a bit more esoteric…. I recently wrote a function to deal with a strange problem. Writing the function ended up being a fun challenge related to computing on the R language itself. Here’s the problem: Write a function that tak... [Read more...]

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An R Cookbook can be found at http://code.ca-net.org/R%20Cookbook. It is a short web document presenting dozens of examples on - Accessing Database with packages RSQLite, RMySQL, RdbiPgSQL and RODBC; - Reading and Writing Data; - Date/Time variable; - Graphics; - … Continue reading → [Read more...]

  This is the first in a series of blog posts in which I use the R package GGPlot2 to examine real world data. In this post, I construct a line graph of U.S. shoe consumption from 1995 to 2007. A recent survey conducted by Shop Smart magazine found that the average ... [Read more...]

Bubbles. I’m no expert in behavioral economics, but bubbles seem to be well understood (after they occur) although they seem hard to detect (at least in the eyes of outsiders and late bubble participants). This post won’t tell you how to avoid bubbles, but might give you some ... [Read more...]

For anyone who wants to estimate linear or nonlinear mixed-effects models (aka random-effects models, hierarchical models or multilevel models) using the R language, the Quantum Forest blog has several recent posts that will be of interest. Written by Luis Apiolaza from the School of Forestry at the University of Canterbury ... [Read more...]

We (Edwin de Jonge and me) have recently updated our editrules package. The most important new features include (beta) support for categorical data. However, in this post I'm going to show some visualizations we included, made possible by Gabor Csardi's … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Starting to write a blog I need a way how to publish my R codes. One possibility would be to just add some formatting with Pretty R. Nice, but I miss a repository with all codes ever submitted and possibility to make corrections.The final solution was ... [Read more...]

In most mixed linear model packages (e.g. asreml, lme4, nlme, etc) one needs to specify only the model equation (the bit that looks like y ~ factors...) when fitting simple models. We explicitly say nothing about the covariances that complete … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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In the last few posts I introduced Maximum Loss, Mean-Absolute Deviation, and Expected shortfall (CVaR) and Conditional Drawdown at Risk (CDaR) risk measures. These risk measures can be formulated as linear constraints and thus can be combined with each other to control multiple risk measures during construction of efficient frontier. ... [Read more...]

The PAWL package (which I talked about there, and which implements the parallel adaptive Wang-Landau algorithm and adaptive Metropolis-Hastings for comparison) is now on CRAN! http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/PAWL/index.html which means that within R you can easily install it by typing install.packages("PAWL") Isn’... [Read more...]

We introduced batch processing 3 weeks ago. Many people asked about differences and benefits of batch processing or interactive sessions. Lets start with the definitions: Batch Processing / Batch Jobs: Batch processing is the execution of a series of programs or only one task on a computer environment without manual intervention. All ... [Read more...]

Now we move on to the second part of the Exercise 5.2, which requires to implement regularized logistic regression using Newton's Method. Plot the data: [Read more...]

My treebase package is now up on the CRAN repository. (Source code is up, the binaries should appear soon). Here’s a few introductory examples to illustrate some of the functionality of the package. Thanks in part to new data deposition requirements at journals such as Evolution, Am Nat, and ... [Read more...]

Introduction This semester I’m TA’ing a course on the Psychology of Music taught by Phil Johnson-Laird. It’s been a great course to teach because (i) so much of the material is new to me and (ii) because the study of the psychology of music brings together so ... [Read more...]