I did a screencast for my co-workers to show how to get started with R, specifically what a base installation of R looks like, then showing how to improve your workflow using RStudio, Rcmdr or rattle.  The examples are somewhat … Continue reading →Video: R, RStudio, Rcmdr & rattle is an article ... [Read more...]

I'm heading out on vacation to my Australian homeland for the next two weeks, but fear not reader friends: we have an awesome lineup of guest bloggers to fill in while I'm away. I don't want to ruin the surprise, but you'll be seeing posts from: experts in data visualization ... [Read more...]

You might remember a second proposal I put forward for this summer’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC). This project was ambitious, looking to convert a subset of Attillio Meucci’s MatLab code to R. Thankfully, Brian Peterson took the lead mentor position for this particular project. Coincidently, the day ... [Read more...]

Another post about the R-squared coefficient, and about why, after some years teaching econometrics, I still hate when students ask questions about it. Usually, it starts with "I have a _____ R-squared... isn't it too low ?" Please, feel free to fi... [Read more...]

Because I am self-taught in many of the areas of computer science and more advanced statistics and probability theory I am most interested in, and because I have a deep aversion both to looking foolish and being full of it... [Read more...]

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A new major released of Armadillo came out earlier today. I prepared the corresponding RcppArmadillo package 0.3.4.0 which also arrived on CRAN earlier today. This released contains a few performance improvements, the beginnings of support of sparse matrices and more, see below. We also post the NEWS entry for the beta ... [Read more...]

The social crowdfunding site Kickstarter announced today that it has enabled, via community contributions, $50M in funding in 2012 for new indie games. The second largest category of funding was for independent films. The blog post announcing the news includes analysis (using R, natch) of the breakdown in categories and funding ... [Read more...]

My first book on probability is completed. HTML version is freely available at theanalysisofdata.com and print version coming soon at a discounted price. Also, check out chapters 4 and 5 (available in pdf format) of the upcoming second volume on R programming and R graphics. http://theanalysisofdata.com/probability/viewer1.html (... [Read more...]

You can query global climate data from the KNMI Climate Explorer (the KNMI is the Royal Netherlands Metereological Institute) with R.Here's a little example how I retreived data for my hometown Innsbruck, Austria and plotted annual total precipitation.... [Read more...]

Hi internet, we’re happy to be here. We’ll be covering a range of topics in this blog — we’ll talk to inventors and creative people as they launch their projects from Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, we’ll talk about the crowd-funding industry and where it’s headed, and we’... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from June of particular interest to R users. RStan is a new package for Bayesian modeling with R. It's faster and can fit more highly-correlated models than the MCMC sampler of BUGS and JAGS. Biostatistician Corey Chivers used R to animate ... [Read more...]

This image comes from the cover of Preliminary Papers of the Second International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (1989). Someone abandoned it in the lobby of my building at school. Whatever for, I’ll never know. I just love the idea of machine learning/AI/Statistics evoking a robot hand ... [Read more...]

Have you ever exported an R plot as a PDF and tried to edit it further by importing the PDF into a vector graphics program like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape? What typically happens is the points on the plot get... [Read more...]

Mango Solutions host BaselR, a free, open and informal R user group for those using or interested in using R. There will be a few short R related presentations and an [Read more...]

Consider a (stationary) autoregressive process, say of order 2, for some white noise with variance . Here is a code to generate such a process, __ phi1=.5 __ phi2=-.4 __ sigma=1.5 __ set.seed(1) __ n=240 __ WN=rnorm(n,sd=sigma) __ ... [Read more...]

Update Oct-23: Added a new parameter add to the function. Now multiple groups can be plotted in a single plot (see example in my comment) As a follow-up on my R implementation of Solomon’s watercolor plots, I made some improvements to the function. I fine-tuned the graphical parameters (the ... [Read more...]

Stan is a new, open source, Bayesian inference tool. Stan is based on the the No-U-Turn sampler, a variant of Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. In order to compare Stan with JAGS, a gibbs sampler approach to Bayesian inference, I used the classic WinBUGS rats example. The rats example uses a hierarchical ... [Read more...]

Suicide is a tragic and complex problem. This week New Zealand’s Chief Coroner released its annual statistics on suicide, which come with several tables and figures. One of those figures refers to monthly suicides in the Christchurch region (where I … Continue reading → [Read more...]

In an image each pixel is a color and that color hava a RGB representation, this means each color is represented by a triplet. For example the red in this representation is (250, 0, 0), black is (0,0,0) and white is (250, 250, 250) (see here more ... [Read more...]