RDieHarder is an R package providing access to the DieHarder battery of tests for random number generators developed by Robert G. Brown and others. DieHarder had been updated to version 3.1.1 a while back, and I had been a little behind with updating... [Read more...]

Bob Muenchen has recently updated his report on the popularity of statistical software. With the updated analysis, we see that the R community remains as strong as ever: the number of contributed R packages continues its exponential growth rate, R maintains its dominance in online discussion, and has 20x the ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

This past week at work I had the opportunity to code the same algorithm using each of the three scientific programming/scripting languages I'm familiar with:MatlabPythonRThe list above is the order that the (re)-coding was done and serves as a beginnin... [Read more...]

In my previous post, I wrote about ways scale choice could distort the ways survey results portray the things they are supposed to measure. This certainly isn’t a new issue – researchers who use surveys often go to great lengths to ensure that their surveys are valid and reliable, which ... [Read more...]

Oracle just released the latest update to Oracle R Enterprise, version 1.1. This release includes the Oracle R Distribution (based on open source R, version 2.13.2), an improved server installation, and much more.  The key new features include: ... [Read more...]

Oracle has released an update to the Oracle R Distribution, an Oracle-supported distribution of open source R. Oracle R Distribution 2-13.2 now contains the ability to dynamically link the following libraries on both Windows and Linux: The I... [Read more...]

Introduction Even though the effectiveness of mindfulness to reduce pain has been proven in numerous empirical studies its efficacy still remain unclear. Meaning that the effectiveness of mindfulness could be due to some other variable than the specific technique. Potential placebo responses or regression toward the mean could dilute the ... [Read more...]

In 2006 Mebane Faber published a great piece of research detailing an asset allocation system that was both very easy to understand and implement, as well as carrying very respectable risk adjusted returns.The details are available in his paper&nb... [Read more...]

Some time ago I got inspired by a post on r-bloggers.com, showing the housing bubble in several US cities, nicely done with ggplot. I extended this to incorporate two measures of problems in the consumer credit markets: the percentage of people with a ... [Read more...]

StatET (an Eclipse plug-in that can handle, among other things, R) offers support for writing Sweave (.Rnw) documents. This is done via the external tool dialog, where one creates a new “device” that takes in a document and runs it over appropriate functions and programs. In this case, Sweave and ... [Read more...]

Summary: A new function in the WRS package compares many quantiles of two distributions simultaneously while controlling the overall alpha error. When comparing data from two groups, approximately 99.6% of all psychological research compares the central tendency (that is a … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Low volatility and minimum variance strategies have been getting a lot of attention lately due to their outperformance in recent years. Let’s take a look at how we can incorporate this low volatility effect into a monthly rotational strategy with a basket of ETFs. Performance Summary from Low Volatility ... [Read more...]

The Revolution blog links to an O'Reilly  interview with two CIO's from the Consumer Protection Bureau. The gist of the interview is "Open Source is Great, we are using it for everything; R and Big Data are the next hot thing, et cetera".  I ... [Read more...]

Conrad Sanderson released a bug-fix version 3.0.1 following up on the very recent 3.0.0 version of his excellent Armadillo C++ template library for linear algebra. I made a new RcppArmadillo release 0.3.0.1 which just appeared on CRAN. The short ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from March of particular interest to R users. New features in the latest version of ggplot2 include choropleths, violin plots, and improved annotations. A video demonstration of big-data Naive Bayes and Classification Tree models with Revolution R Enterprise for IBM Netezza. ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

sixty twotorials now posted. two minutes each.new video highlights:024 how to run counts, tables, crosstabs, and flat tables on a data frame in r 030 what is a function anyway and how does it input and output stuff in r 022 how to generate b... [Read more...]

Here is part 2 of my guide to using ggplot2. Scales Following on directly from the previous notes you can manually adjust the colours and shapes used in the chart if you don’t like the defaults, as shown in figure 1. … Continue reading &#8... [Read more...]

Last week, I read a chapter out of Visualize This by Nathan Yau.  I was, of course, delighted to see that he was championing the use of R.  One really cool thing that I learned from his book, and was very … Continue reading → [Read more...]