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Here is the code that fixed up the World Bank data export for use in Tableau. The databank spits out everything in an untidy format for grouping and aggregating. The reshape2 and plyr packages  make it easy to manipulate the whole set … Continue reading → [Read more...]

You might ask what R has to do with theater. I assure you it has. I act in the theater group ‘ndescenze. We will soon present (actually, we just performed) a show based on the Marx Brothers Radio Shows. We shuffle actors and characters during the show (we like it ... [Read more...]

Visualizing car brand choices in ggplot2: [Read more...]

Ever wondered how to estimate Fama-MacBeth or cluster-robust standard errors in R? It can actually be very easy. First, for some background information read Kevin Goulding’s blog post, Mitchell Petersen’s programming advice, Mahmood Arai’s paper/note and code (there is an earlier version of the code with ... [Read more...]

When starting out with R, getting data in and out can be a bit of a pain. It should take long to work out a convenient method – depending on what OS you use and what other packages you work with. In my case I prefer to work with Excel spreadsheets (... [Read more...]

It’s midnight officially. Let me solve the sixth problem before bed. This is a quick one. The sum of the squares of the first ten natural numbers is, 12 + 22 + … + 102 = 385. The square of … Continue reading → [Read more...]

IntroductionI don't know about you, but I really hate getting parking tickets. Sometimes I feel like it's all just a giant cash grab. Really? I can't park there between the hours of 11 and 3, but every other time is okay? Well, why the hell not?Bu... [Read more...]

I am playing around with SAS IML Studio 3.4.  For those that do not know, IML (Interactive Matrix Language) is the Matlab-esk language from SAS.  It opperates from normal SAS code through the PROC IML procedure.  A new (to me at least) UI has been developed for analysts called IML Studio.  ... [Read more...]

I wanted to get these releases out the door before the useR conference, especially since I’m giving a tutorial on Rook! There were two bugs found in Rook, not by me, but by users! This is a fantastic step in the right direction as it’s an ... [Read more...]

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Browsing commandlinefu.com today, I came across this little one-liner to display which commands I use most often. Here’s what I got: Yep, seems legit. I navigate and look at files a whole bunch (ls, cd, cat), and I do a butt tonne of editing (vim). I sudo like ... [Read more...]

I will be giving in less than four weeks a short course at the 6th R/Rmetrics Meielisalp Workshop & Summer School on Computational Finance and Financial Engineering organized by ETH Zürich, https://www.rmetrics.org/. The talk will be on Actuarial models with R, and first part will be ... [Read more...]

Patrick Burns, author of the excellent R Inferno, gave a presentation about R at the Cambridge R User Group this week. (Revolution Analytics is a proud sponsor of CambR.) I wasn't at the presentation myself, but Pat always gives a great talk, and he's generously provided his slides with copious ... [Read more...]

Game ResultsI recently made a post about developing an algorithm to predict the NBA playoffs, and I concluded with 2 predictions. Although Miami beat the Celtics to make my algorithm 1-0 in terms of predictions, it fell to 1-1 when the Thunder beat th... [Read more...]

The design of the statistical programming language R sits in a slightly uncomfortable place between the functional programming and object oriented paradigms. The upside is you get a lot of the expressive power of both programming paradigms. A downside of this is: the not always useful variability of the language’... [Read more...]

Colors are mysterious business and choosing the right color or color palette for an R graphics can sometimes be a chore. To alleviate this burden, I present two functions for choosing color values. To access these functions install the RSurvey and dichromat packages:

install.packages<span>(</span>c<span>(</span><span>"RSurvey"</span><span>,</span> <span>"dichromat"</span><span>))</span>
library<span>(</span>RSurvey<span>)</span>

Choose Color The first function, ChooseColor (... [Read more...]