I recently began using the TwitteR package in R to examine my tweeting patterns. One of my first projects was to identify each of my Twitter followers, where they were located, how many tweets they had, and then plot their location on a map using a bubble which was related ... [Read more...]

Scalding is an in-house MapReduce framework that Twitter recently open-sourced. Like Pig, it provides an abstraction on top of MapReduce that makes it easy to write big data jobs in a syntax that’s simple and concise. Unlike Pig, Scalding is written in pure Scala – which means all the power ... [Read more...]

I have been playing around with some data from Eurobarometer, to support some arguments for a small comment I am writing for the Maastricht Law Review. I got the data for the following two questions: I would like to ask you a question about how much ... [Read more...]

What’s the potential audience size around a Twitter hashtag? Way back when, in the early days of webs stats, reported figures tended to centre around the notion of hits, the number of calls made to a server via website activity. I forget the details, but the metric was presumably ... [Read more...]

After reading David Smith’s tweet on the price of Oracle R Enterprise (actually free, but it requires Oracle Data Mining at $23K/core as pointed out by Joshua Ulrich.) I went to Oracle’s site to see what was all about. Oracle … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Major part of modern research is trying to find patterns in the given dataset using learning methods. One of the methods that can use a priori information for such purpose is Markov chains, in which the probability of symbol occurrence … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The Dev Team at Revolution Analytics recently released an update to the Revolution R 5 family. Version 5.0.1 adds compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 for all editions (Community, Academic and Enterprise). This expands the platform support to Red Hat 5, Red Hat 6 and Microsoft Windows. For Revolution R Enterprise customers and users ... [Read more...]

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Here’s a short example of calculating zero rates and discount factors from cash rates using futile.paradigm. Of note is how …Continue reading » [Read more...]

Description: Average age of passenger cars and light trucks in the United States since 1995. The gray area represents the possible variance of the trend line with 95% confidence. Data: https://www.polk.com/company/news/average_age_of_vehicles_... [Read more...]

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Title: A Backstage Tour of ggplot2 with Hadley WickhamDate: Wednesday, February 8, 2012Time: 11:00AM - 12:00PM PacificPresenter: Hadley Wickham, Professor of Statistics, Rice UniversityRegister here.I used ggplot2 extensively a few years ago, but rever... [Read more...]

Next Thursday (Jan. 16), at the RSS, there will be a special half-day meeting (afternoon, starting at 13:30) on Recent Advances in Monte Carlo Methods organised by the General Application Section. The speakers are Richard Everitt, University of Oxford, Missing data, and what to do about it Anthony Lee, Warwick University, Auxiliary ... [Read more...]

In part 2 of this series of posts on RStudio Server, I commented that I suspected that RStudio Server would be fast. The first time I tried this from a remote connection, I was disappointed with the performance. Many companies… See more › [Read more...]

I came across Dr. Peter Norvig’s blog about writing a basic spell-checker (http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html), and just had to try to implement it in R. Please excuse the ugly-ish code (I have not optimized it or commented it adequately at this point, but you can get the ... [Read more...]

I’ve neglected this blog for quite some time but I’m getting around to finishing up a bunch of draft posts. But here is a quick one: Listing objects in your global environment A simple ls() doesn’t really tell you enough useful information at a glance. Most often ... [Read more...]

This is an exciting release of futile.matrix, which in some ways the package grows up and finds its purpose. It …Continue reading » [Read more...]

Over the weekend, I have added a few slides referring to recent papers mentioning the convergence of ABC algorithms, in particular the very relevant paper by Dean et al. I had already discussed in an earlier post. (This is taking a larger chunk of my time than expected! I am ... [Read more...]

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