The purpose of software engineering research is to figure out how software development works so that the software industry can improve its quality/timeliness (i.e., lower costs and improved customer satisfaction). Research is hampered by the fact that companies are not usually willing to make public good quality data ... [Read more...]

Scott Chamberlain blogged about faster creation of binomial matrices the other day, and even referred to our RcppArmadillo package as a possible solution (though claiming he didn't get it to work, tst tst -- that is what the rcpp-devel list is here to help with). The post also fell short ... [Read more...]

Here are a couple of tutorials I’ve written to help anyone who’s interested in learning how to produce simple bar charts or simple segmented bar charts in R, given that you have […] [Read more...]

Andrew Gelman has announced the release of Stan version 1.0.0 and its R interface RStan.  Stan – named after Stanislaw Ulam, the inventor of the Monte Carlo method – is a new MCMC program that represents a major technological leap … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Join the RDataMining project to build a comprehensive R package for data mining http://www.rdatamining.com/package We have started the RDataMining project on R-Forge to build an R package for data mining. The package will provide various functionalities for data mining, with … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Have you ever wanted an easy way to generate continuous color pallettes for a discrete factor? I came across a question over on Stackoverflow about how add color to a ggplot figure. I often find myself with lot’s of categories that are discrete when I want a continuous color ... [Read more...]

Another Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project this summer focused on creating functions for doing returns-based performance attribution. I’ve always been a little puzzled about why this functionality wasn’t covered already, but I think that most analysts do this kind of work in Excel. That, of course, has ... [Read more...]

I created an R package a while back to interact with some APIs that serve up data on what our elected represenatives are up to, including the New York Times Congress API, and the Sunlight Labs API. What kinds of things can you do with govdat? Here ... [Read more...]