I should start this with a disclaimer, ie that I'm not really claiming any "success" with this post. But I find it quite interesting that the estimations I produced with this very, very simple model turned out to be quite good.The idea was to use the e... [Read more...]

My favorite statistician did it again! Just like in 2008, he predicted the presidential election results almost perfectly. For those that don’t know, Nate Silver is the statistician that runs the fivethirtyeight blog. He combines data from hundreds of polls, uses … Continue reading → [Read more...]

In this post we'll fit some predicitve models in (well know) data bases, and evalute the performance of each model. Disclaimer1: for simplicity the predictive variables are treating without apply any transformation to get a better performance or stabil... [Read more...]

This entry is part 6 of 11 in the series Using ROne of the reasons that R has so much functionality is that people have incorporated a lot of academic code written in C, C++, Fortran and Java into various …   read more ... [Read more...]

I just sat in on the rehearsal for Thursday's webinar by John Deere's Derek Hoffman, Order Fulfillment Forecasting at John Deere: How R Facilitates Creativity and Flexibility. Derek will give a spirited argument of why R is critical for the faming equipment manufacturer's operations: from forecasting demand for equipment, forecasting ... [Read more...]

New hook functions, makeContext() and makeContent(), have been added to the grid graphics package. These functions allow an alternative approach to developing custom grobs when a grob can only decide what to draw at drawing time rather than when the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Recently we at rOpenSci released our rfigshare package up on cran (or you can check out the most up to date version on github. So what’s so great about being able to create figshare articles through R? For some time now I’ve been advocating the use of a ... [Read more...]

Short update to Speed up R by using a different BLAS implementation/: MKL is overall the fastest OpenBLAS is faster than its parent GotoBLAS and comes close to MKL A = matrix(rnorm(n*n),n,n) A %*% A solve(A) svd(A) [Read more...]

I think it’s rather marvellous that a few expert coders are working on dispelling the cloud of mystery around the proprietary file format used by SAS software. Essentially, saving your data in a SAS format (with a name like mydata.sas7bdat) … Continue reading → [Read more...]

There are a few minor tweaks renaming on this map before it is complete, but I wanted to share the EPS Market Map I put together.  It can be downloaded using this link. This file is meant to be used with R and divides the lower 48 states into the CollegeBoard’... [Read more...]

The grey background and/or default choice of colours for groups makes a ggplot graph stand out to any R user when seen in a presentation. But ggplot graphs get all ninja when it comes to publications, either that or not … Continue reading → [Read more...]

A friend asked me to help with a forest plot recently. After chatting about what she wanted the end result to look like, this is what I came up with. grid.arrange(data_table, p, ncol=2) ## Warning: Removed 1 rows containing missing … Continue reading → [Read more...]

the national survey on drug use and health (nsduh) monitors illicit drug, alcohol, and tobacco use with more detail than any other survey out there.  if you wanna know the average age at first chewing tobacco dip, the prevalence of needle-sharing,... [Read more...]

I recently came across the Optimal Rebalancing Strategy Using Dynamic Programming for Institutional Portfolios by W. Sun, A. Fan, L. Chen, T. Schouwenaars, M. Albota paper that examines the cost of different rebablancing methods. For example, one might use calendar rebalancing: i.e. rebalance every month / quarter / year. Or one ... [Read more...]

With the election nearly upon us, I wanted to share an easy way I just found to download polling data and graph a few with ggplot2. dlinzer at github created a function to download poll data from the Huffington Post's Pollster API.The default is to dow... [Read more...]

In response to last week's post on the rapidly increasing ideology of the US Republican Party, Mike Lawrence suggested another way of looking at the DW-NOMINATE ideology data. Rather than simply looking at boxplots of the congress scores by party over time, we could fit a smooth curve to get ... [Read more...]

A new version 0.2.9 of RInside arrived on CRAN earlier today; Windows binaries have already been built too. RInside provides a set of convenience classes which facilitate embedding of R inside of C++ applications and programs, using the classes and ... [Read more...]

The purpose of Rcpp modules has always been to make it easy to expose C++ functions and classes to R. Up to now, Rcpp modules did not have a way to declare inheritance between C++ classes. This is now fixed in the development version, and t... [Read more...]

In this post I showed a visualization of the organizational network of my department. Since several people asked for details how the plot has been produced, I will provide the code and some extensions below. The plot has been done … Continue reading → [Read more...]

When I talk about collaborative work, I don’t mean spending a day or two helping compute some p-values and end up as middle author in a subject-matter paper. I mean spending months working on a project, from start to finish, with experts … Continue reading → [Read more...]