In this third part of the data types series, I'll go an important class that I skipped over so far: factors.Factors are categorical variables that are super useful in summary statistics, plots, and regressions. They basically act like dummy variables t... [Read more...]

A quick heads-up that I'll be presenting another brand-new webinar on Thursday next week (November 29). In Real-time Big Data Analytics: From Deployment to Production, I'll review the process of making predictive models work in real-live operational environments. I'll also tackle those ubiquitous buzz-words "real-time" and "big data", and the fact ... [Read more...]

At a meeting last night with some collaborators at the Vélobstacles project, I was excitedly told about the magic of IPython and it’s notebook functionality for reproducible research. This sounds familiar, I thought to myself. Using a literate programming approach to integrate computation with the communication of methodology ... [Read more...]

I’ll be subbing today for Chris, as we continue to explore some ggplot2 basics. Today, imagine that you have data distributed in two dimensions, and that you would like to convey differences in point density over space. As with many things, this... [Read more...]

[caption id="attachment_411" align="aligncenter" width="500"] A nice package can be both beautiful and functional. The image is CC by MIAD Communication Design.[/caption] Inspired by this post by Szilard Pafka I decided to do a similar adventure in a Windows environment and see what problems I run into. Start ... [Read more...]

We all know that the odds of flipping an unbiased coin is 50% heads, 50% tails. But what happens if you do this a lot of times. Do you expect the same number of heads and tails? What if we took a cumulative sum where heads = +1 and tails = -1. What wou... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

We introduced Rcpp 0.10.0 with a number of very nice new features a few days ago, and the activity on the rcpp-devel mailing list has been pretty responsive which is awesome. But because few things beat a nice example, this post tries to build some more excitement. We will illustrate how ... [Read more...]

I'm really looking forward to useR! 2013 (the international conference for R users), and not just because it's being held in Spain next year (July 10-12). The program is already coming together, with a great lineup of invited speakers, including R-core member Duncan Murdoch and prolific package authoR Hadley Wickham. You ... [Read more...]

I spotted on R-bloggers a post discussing optimising the efficiency of programming accept-reject algorithms. While it is about SAS programming, and apparently supported by the SAS company, there are two interesting features with this discussion. The first one is about avoiding the dreaded loop in accept-reject algorithms. For instance, taking ... [Read more...]

After a four month simmer on various back burners and package conflicts, I’m pleased to announce that the successor to …Continue reading » [Read more...]

I gave this talk last night to the Melbourne Users of R Network. Examples [Read more...]

Last week we released version 0.1.5-4 of the ChainLadder package on CRAN. The R package provides methods which are typically used in insurance claims reserving. If you are new to R or insurance check out my recent talk on Using R in Insurance.The chain-ladder method which is a popular ... [Read more...]

A commenter on my previous blog entry has drawn my attention to an R function called hetglm() that estimates heteroskedastic probit models. This function is contained in the glmx package. The glmx package is not available on CRAN yet, but thankfully can be downloaded here. The hetglm() function has a ... [Read more...]

Quite a lot of people have had fun recently with prime factorization. It all started on The Math Less Traveled, then various versions of the prime factorization diagrams appeared (here, here, this animated one, etc., they are actually more or less listed here). So I wanted to have fun too ... [Read more...]

It’s a lovely day. I took a walk around the campus after lunch. The scene was enjoyable in one deep autumn day. Before the afternoon work, I’d like to spend a few moments on the 24th Euler Problem. A permutation is an ordered arrangement of … Continue reading → [Read more...]

[Read more...]

This past Saturday I led a data dive workshop for the Dallas R Users Group using Lahman’s baseball statistics. After providing a brief introduction to the Lahman R package and showing how to load the data and make some basic plots,... [Read more...]

In this post, I made an SEM model and showed the results in a table.It’s a great feature of SEM that you can sketch your ideas about how the world works, and being able to get such a sketch back out of OpenMx is very helpful.Importantly, a ... [Read more...]

I’ve been hunting for a lightweight CSV editor for OSX so I could to make fixes to data files and not need to fire up Excel. While you can edit a CSV file in any text editor, it’s a pain to navigate the files without a spreadsheet-like interface. ... [Read more...]