Here is a follow-up of my first post about using R. For our yearly KU Leuven Geology PhD Seminar (08-09/05/2012), I quickly pasted this script together from several examples I had run into in the past, as well as some things that I have been doing myse... [Read more...]

The rushing game is slowly disappearing. Heave That Sucker When it doubt, chunk the pigskin. Whether you like it or not, NFL (National Football League) teams are relying upon passing more and more. Looking at the above chart, the average p... [Read more...]

Accounting for temporal dependence in econometric analysis is important, as the presence of temporal dependence violates the assumption that observations are independent units. Historically, much less attention has been paid to correcting for spatial dependence, which, if present, also violates this independence assumption. The comparability of temporal and spatial dependence ... [Read more...]

From August 1990. It was in the form of a note sent to all the people in the statistics group of Bell Labs, where I’d worked that summer. To all: Here’s the abstract of the work I’ve done this summer. It’s stored in the file, /fs5/gelman/... [Read more...]

by Yanchang Zhao, RDataMining.com My book in draft titled “R and Data Mining: Examples and Case Studies” is now available on CRAN at http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html. It is scheduled to be published by Elsevier in late 2012. Its latest version can be … Continue reading → [Read more...]

This is a guest post written by Branson Owen, an enthusiastic R and data.table user. Wow, a long time desired feature of data.table finally came true in version 1.8.1! data.table now allowed numeric columns and big number (via bit64) in …Read more » [Read more...]

  I can never seem to get exactly what I want from an R text editor. Let me correct that, I can never seem to get exactly what I want from an R text editor on a MAC. I used to use Tinn-R  which met most  my needs: Free,lightweight with ... [Read more...]

The more I’ve worked with my really large data set, the more cumbersome the work has become to my work computer.  Keep in mind I’ve got a quad core with 8 gigs of RAM.  With growing irritation at how slow … Continue reading → [Read more...]

There are quite a few books out now on “data science”. I’ve picked out three that I think are the best place to start for computational journalists. First is Machine Learning for Hackers, by Drew Conway and John Myles White. The autho... [Read more...]

Foursquare, the mobile location-sharing app (of which I'm a big fan), has an excellent recommondation system. Based on your recent checkins, places your friends found popular, and even the time of day, Foursquare Explore will recommend a great place for a sushi lunch, or the best place to buy new ... [Read more...]

I have posted previously about the open data available on Socrata (https://opendata.socrata.com/), and I was looking at the site again today when I stumbled upon a listing of levels of various radioactive isotopes by US city and state. The data is available at https://opendata.socrata.com/... [Read more...]

The recent Hack/Reduce hackathon in Montreal was a tonne of fun. Our team tackled a data set of consisting of Bixi (Montreal’s bicycle share system) station states at one minute temporal resolution. We used Hadoop and mapreduce to pull out some features of user behaviours. One of the ... [Read more...]

Yair pointed me to this awesome blog of how the NYT people make their graphs. This blows away all other stat graphics blogs (including this one). Lots of examples from mockup to first tries to final version. I recognize a lot of what they’re doing from my own experience. ... [Read more...]

Milano R net, in collaboration with Quantide, organizes an "Introduction to R" course Milano; June 7-8, 2012 Continue reading → [Read more...]

In R, the traditional way to load packages can sometimes lead to situations where several lines of code need to be written just to load packages. These lines can cause errors if the packages are not installed, and can also be hard to maintain, particularly during deployment. Fortunately, there is ... [Read more...]

by Yanchang Zhao, RDataMining.com With a Mac, parallel computing can be achieved with package multicore. Unfortunately, it does not work under Windows. A simple way for parallel computing under Windows (and also Mac) is using package snowfall, which can work … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Anthony made a video tutorial on how to use the formatR package, which I think is pretty cool: I wish I could speak English as fast as him... [Read more...]

Diversification is hard to find nowadays because financial markets are becoming increasingly correlated. I found a good visually presentation of Cross Sectional Correlation of stocks in the S&P 500 index in the Trading correlation by D. Varadi and C. Rittenhouse article. Let’s compute and plot the average correlation among ... [Read more...]

Previous posts: Correlation of temperature proxies with observations The “best” proxies for temperature reconstruction Okay, I couldn’t resist. I wanted to provide some more in depth analysis of temperature proxies, but I just went ahead and did my own little reconstruction of Northern hemisphere annual average temperatures over the ... [Read more...]

We have now completed our revision of the paper Relevant statistics for Bayesian model choice, written with Judith Rousseau, Jean-Michel Marin, and Natesh Pillai. It has been resubmitted to Series B and reposted on arXiv. The major change in the paper is the inclusion of a check about the relevance ... [Read more...]