Think of something observable – countable – that you care about with only one outcome or another. It could be the votes cast in a two-way election in your town, or the free throw shots the center on your favorite... [Read more...]

In the prior post, Factor Attribution 2, I have shown how Factor Attribution can be applied to decompose fund’s returns in to Market, Capitalization, and Value factors, the “three-factor model” of Fama and French. Today, I want to show you a different application of Factor Attribution. First, let’s run ... [Read more...]

A new release of the RcppBDT package appeared on CRAN earlier today. RcppBDT uses Rcpp, and in particular the nifty Rcpp modules feature of wrapping C++ code for R just by declaring the (class or function) interfaces. It uses this to bring in some useful functions from Boost Date.Time ... [Read more...]

News is starting to leak that the Large Hadron Collider may have accomplished its primary mission of confirming the existence of the hypothesised and heretofore elusive subatomic particle, the Higgs Boson. And sure, billions of Euros worth of state-of-the-art high-energy machinery and an army of experimental and theoretical physicists probably ... [Read more...]

I recently posted about coefficient plots, discussing my approach and providing some example R code to create the graphs. I had the good fortune of hearing Amanda Driscoll give a talk recently, and she made a small, but really nice … Continue rea... [Read more...]

The ggplot2 package provides an excellent platform for data visualization. One (minor) drawback of this package is that combining ggplot images into one plot, like the par() function does for regular plots, is not a straightforward procedure. Fortunately, R user Stephen Turner has kindly provided a function called “arrange” that ... [Read more...]

The knitr package provides an easy way to embed R code in a Jekyll-Bootstrap blog post. The only required input is an R Markdown source file. The name of the source file used to generate this post is 2012-07-03-knitr-jekyll.Rmd, available here. Steps taken to build this post ... [Read more...]

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Conrad releaser version 3.2.3 of Armadillo a few days ago, and the corresponding RcppArmadillo package 0.3.2.3 is now CRAN. (For these keeping score 3.2.1 never was a full release, and 3.2.2 containing fixes for a build issue that did not affect the ... [Read more...]

R is an incredibly comprehensive statistics package. Even if you just look at the standard R distribution (the base and recommended packages), R can do pretty much everything you need for data manipulation, visualization, and statistical analysis. And for everything else, there's more than 5000 packages on CRAN and other repositories, ... [Read more...]

Following the crash of my hard drive right before leaving Kyoto, I bought a cheap Compaq Presario CQ57 to reinstall Ubuntu 12.04 over the weekend (and have a laptop available before leaving for Australia…)  It took about one hour to install from the DVD and everything seems to be working out ... [Read more...]

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It’s been a while since I solved one Euler problem last time. Has been busy. Now I’m back and continue to solve the next problem, which is to find the maximum. Let’s take a look at the 11th problem: What … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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For me Kaggle becomes a social network for data scientist, as stackoverflow.com or github.com for programmers. If you are data scientist, machine learner or statistician you better off to have a profile there, otherwise you do not exist. Nevertheless, I won’t bet on rosy future for data ... [Read more...]

No doubt those that read my blog know that the tools I use to do my Industrial Engineering and Operations Research work heavily rely on the open source side of software.  That is why I try to support as many open source projects such as COIN-OR, G... [Read more...]

I was at a talk awhile ago where the speaker presented tables with 4, 5, 6, even 8 significant digits even though, as is usual, only the first or second digit of each number conveyed any useful information. A graph would be better, but even if you’re too lazy to make a plot, ... [Read more...]

What is the difference between Monte Carlo — as it is usually defined in finance — and random portfolios? The meaning of “Monte Carlo” The idea of “Monte Carlo” is very simple.  It is a fancy word for “simulation”. As usual, it is all too possible to find incredibly muddied explanations of ... [Read more...]

Plot the distribution of a sample as bars and add a histogram line for visualizing the sample characteristics. No related posts. [Read more...]

Due to my work with a multitude of statistical packages in my career I may be able to evaluate a lot of them. I’ve first used Excel for my calculations as most of the normal users do. I like the idea behind a spreadsheet and the combination of data ... [Read more...]