Ebola has also appeared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The WHO report from 21 August reports 15 cases and 10 deaths, mostly in the town of Isiro. This outbreak is in no way related to the Ugandan outbreak … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Logistic Regression is a popular and effective technique for modeling categorical outcomes as a function of both continuous and categorical variables. The question is: how robust is it? Or: how robust are the common implementations? (note: we are using robust in a more standard English sense of performs well for ... [Read more...]

Alan brought up the suspicion to Ye’s world record in women 400 metres individual medley. And I quote: “Her last split caused controversy (deep suspicion of doping) as she swam it faster than the fastest male swimmer. I wonder how commonly this … Continue reading → [Read more...]

One of the possible barriers to widespread adoption of open notebook science is knowing where to start. Video reports of lab experiments hosted on Youtube can be easily embedded in a hosted WordPress blog; a MediaWiki wiki can be used to provide one page per experiment, with change tracking/history ... [Read more...]

It seems that most of the R-parallelizing business takes place on Linux clusters. And it makes sense. Why would you want to paralellize R on just a few processors (2 or 4) of a Windows laptop PC when the whole…Read more → [Read more...]

If you're writing C++ code and want to generate random numbers, you might not be aware that R provides an API to call the R RNG functionality directly. The Rcpp package's "syntactic sugar" feature makes this process easier, by automating the process of translating a subset of ordinary R code ... [Read more...]

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I have updated the Google Scholar Web-Scraper Function GScholarScaper_2 to GScholarScraper_3 (and GScholarScaper_3.1) as it was outdated due to changes in the Google Scholar html-code. The new script is more slender and faster. It returns a dataframe o... [Read more...]

"Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma."  -- Winston Churchill, radio address in 1939 A couple of weeks ago, Graph of the Week published an article describing the significant improvement in medals won by the host country as opposed to how that country 'normally' performs when not ... [Read more...]

I’ve been going through the medal statistics in London 2012 Olympics recently. I was planning to present some extra charts, such as medal-per-milli-population or medal-vs-GDP. However, it’s a little boring to present the same kind of charts. Thus, I’d like to look into some particular … Continue reading → [Read more...]

We want to evaluate the seriousness of the threat posed by the recent ebola outbreak in western Uganda. The outbreak appeared in Kigadi, a small village in the Kibaale district. The disease was first confirmed by the government on 28 … Continue reading → [Read more...]

[Update 24.08.12: added missing alias following comment by brobar] Whenever I write numerical code I spend half my time debugging my algebra, painstakingly uncovering one sign mistake after another in my calculations. Usually I have computed by hand the gradient or the integral of some nasty function, and I have to ... [Read more...]

Here's a quick demo of creating a map with an inset within it using ggplot. The inset is achieved using the gridExtra package. Install libraries, set directory, read file setwd("/Users/ScottMac/Dropbox/CANPOLIN_networks_ms/data") # change ... [Read more...]

As some of you may know already, I’m co-organizing an upcoming conference called DataGotham that’s taking place in September. To help spread the word about DataGotham, I’m cross-posting the most recent announcement below: We’d like to let you know about DataGotham: a celebration of New York ... [Read more...]

In this tutorial I am going to share my R&D and trading experience using the well-known from statistics Autoregressive Moving Average Model (ARMA). There is a lot written about these models, however, I strongly recommend Introductory Time Series with R, which I find is a perfect combination between light ... [Read more...]

People use the R language every day to create the elements of reports: tables, charts, analyses, and forecasts. But assembling all of that information into a print-ready document laid out with text can a hassle. You can cut-and-paste all of the elements into Word, but then what do you do ... [Read more...]

Data science is a sophisticated and complex discipline, but since it's still an emerging field, its practitioners come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Typically, though, a background in working with large data sets in a research setting is advantageous. This is why you may be mingling with a former ... [Read more...]

It’s almost midnight. Before I go sleeping, I’d like to post the chart about ”medals per event” on 2012 Olympics. As some visitors suggested, I searched for the competition information for each athlete. Finally, thankful to the mighty Guardian datablog, I find the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

[This article was first published on chem-bla-ics, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here) Want to share your [Read more...]

Michael Bach, who is a professor and vision scientist at the University of Freiburg, maintains a fascinating site about visual illusions. One visual illusion really surprised me: the sigma motion. The sigma motion displays a flickering figure of bla... [Read more...]