In this episode: New versions of R and ggplot2 available, listener feedback, and an interactive session with R. The R code discussed in this episode will be available in our GitHub repository, see the show notes for details. There will be a companion screencast to accompany this episode which will ... [Read more...]

I recently had to prepare a beamer presentation in hindi/devanagari. I usually use emacs-orgmode  with a lot of R source code embedded in it to prepare my beamer presentations. To adapt the entire setup to work with devanagari, this is what I needed to do.      Make orgmode export to ... [Read more...]

I was grading my Master projects this morning and came upon this graph: which compares the variability of an importance-sampling estimator versus its self-normalised alternative… This is an interesting case in that self-normalisation does considerably degrade the quality of the approximation in that setting. In other cases, self-normalisation may bring ... [Read more...]

Recently, I needed to figure out how many extension cords I was going to need to buy in order to reach parts of my field site. Wandering around in the field with a surveyor's tape was an option, but so was plotting distances on an aerial image I had of... [Read more...]

The following R function returns the distance between two points located on a plot. The distance returned is in the same units as that of the plot.interDist     aa     dx     dy     sqrt(sum(c(dx^2, dy^2)))} [Read more...]

R is an Open Source project providing an interactive language and environment for statistical computing.  It has become the lingua franca for research in statistical methods.  Because R is an interpreted language it is comparat... [Read more...]

When I bought the first computer for use in our Statistics Department - a Vax 11/750 that cost about a quarter of a million dollars in 1983 - I was considered extravagant because I purchased and installed a second megabyte of memory for the machine. [Read more...]

I really like git. It’s the first versioning tool I’ve ever used so I have nothing else to compare it to, but in the world of statistical model building where iteration is constant (and almost never a strict linear progression)... [Read more...]

After using github for data mining competitions and a project on statistical language models I found I enjoyed it some much I wanted to use it at work too. The trick is there’s a lot of overlap between what I... [Read more...]

My guess is R is most commonly integrated with C/C++ to handle heavy-duty computing. (thanks in no small part due to the productivity of Dick Eddlebuttle!) That said, if you’re like most statisticians and physical scientists and aren’t already a programming... [Read more...]

Jeff Gentry has created a couple of really fun and handy R packages for working with Twitter data called twitteR and ROAuth. He’s also written an easy to read vignette on how to get started. As of right now (March... [Read more...]

As part of considering SPSS as a platform for modeling I wanted to test SPSS’ integration with R. What I found out is getting SPSS to work with R isn’t embarssingly obvious. What’s worse I found it quite difficult to... [Read more...]

Slides from the Boston Predictive Analytics Big Data Workshop tutorials: Big Data Step-by-Step: Infrastructure 1/3: Local VM Big Data Step-by-Step: Infrastructure 2/3: Running R and RStudio on EC2 Big Data Step-by-Step: Infrastructure 3/3: Taking it to the cloud... easily... with Whirr Big Data Step-by-Step: Using R & Hadoop (with RHadoop's rmr package) [Read more...]

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I read Mining Twitter for consumer attitudes towards hotels in my feed of R-bloggers. That reminded me that I intended to look at generating wordclouds for salt and MSG at some point. Salt, or sodium is linked to hypertension, which is linked... [Read more...]

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In the last post I presented a function for recovering marginal effects of interaction terms. Here we implement the function with simulated data and plot the results using ggplot2.       #---Simulate Data and Fit a linear model with an... [Read more...]

*Edit March 12* Be sure to look at the comments, especially the commentary on Hacker News - you can supercharge the find|xargs idea by using find|parallel instead.---Do you ever discover a trick to do something better, faster, or easier, and wish you c... [Read more...]

R user Anthony Damico has created "Twotorials": a series of two-minute tutorials for newcomers to R. Topics include how to download and install R, how to do simple arithmetic in r, how to work with data tables in r and many others. The tutorials are especially useful for users of ... [Read more...]

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