An old irony in New York is the ubiquity of the ‘gourmet deli’. It is hard to find a deli …Continue reading » [Read more...]

I can’t exactly remember how I arrived to Making sense of random effects, a good post in the Distributed Ecology blog (go over there and read it). Incidentally, my working theory is that I follow Scott Chamberlain (@recology_), who follows … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Yesterday I posted an example of plotting 2012 U.S. presidential exit poll results using ggplot2. There I took for granted that a data.frame containing all we need resides in a file called "PresExitPolls2012.Rdata". Today I want to show how I scraped t... [Read more...]

There are several graphics available for visualizing missing data including the VIM package. However, I wanted a plot specifically for looking at the nature of missingness across variables and a clustering variable of interest to support data preparati... [Read more...]

This entry is part 14 of 12 in the series Using RYes, this post condenses 50+ hours of learning into a 15 minute tutorial.  Read ‘em and weep.  (That is, you read while I weep.) OK.  For the last week …   read more ... [Read more...]

A minor bug-fix release 3.4.4 of Armadillo came out upstream a few days ago. RcppArmadillo, our wrapper for R and Armadillo, is now on CRAN with its corresponding version 0.3.4.4. No R level or interface changes were made and the upstream changes are ... [Read more...]

In part inspired by the chart described in The electoral map sans the map, I thought I’d start mulling over a quick sketch showing the race to the 2012 Formula One Drivers’ Championship. The chart needs to show tension somehow, so in this first really quick and simple rough sketch, ... [Read more...]

As mentioned earlier, currently I am playing with trading strategies based on Support Vector Machines. At a high level, the approach is quite similar to what I have implemented for my ARMA+GARCH strategy. Briefly, the simulation goes as follows: we step through the series one period (day, week, etc) ... [Read more...]

The other night in my office I got into a discussion with my office mate, the brilliant scientist / amazing skier Dr. Thor Veen about how to understand the random effect variance term in a mixed-effects model. Thor teaches the R statistics course here at UBC, and last night a student ... [Read more...]

An expressive programming language allows developers to implement algorithms quickly, by using high-level concepts and leaving the details to the language implementation. The result is clearer, more maintainable code that can be created in less time. (Although shorter code isn't always better, especially when taken to extremes.) So which programming ... [Read more...]

I am working on a project with the Rizzo Lab examining the dynamics of Sudden Oak Death (SOD). I really have to write more about this, but today I’m just going to post the results of an initial exercise. Here I attempt to replicate model results from Cobb et ... [Read more...]

The most recent edition of the Revolution Newsletter is out. The news section is below, and you can read the full November edition (with highlights from this blog and community events) online. You can subscribe to the Revolution Newsletter to get it monthly via email. Now Available: Revolution R Enterprise 6.1 ... [Read more...]

My new project is coming along nicely and should be released early 2013. It builds on the structures developed in imDEV to link Excel, Cytoscape and R using RExcel,  RCytoscape, and CytoscapeRPC . This trio can be used to rapidly generate beautiful and  informative network representations of data. Here is an example ... [Read more...]

Congratulations to Bradley Saul, the winner of the Simply Statistics Logo contest! We had some great entries which made it difficult to choose between them. You can see the new logo to the right of our home page or the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

So, when you’re setting the position of text in ggplot, you may have to use the hjust and vjust commands. Depending on your demands, and if you don’t understand what they’re doing, they might seem hard to use. I found one script that... [Read more...]

PEBOS is over. Time to look at the details of the Election. The final results are not yet in, but the exit polls are there, and up for grabs. Just to get warm: here's a tiny example.Obviously Romney had an age problem. But for now I don't want to ... [Read more...]

Data visualizations are useful for exploratory work and as an aid in communicating findings. Data visualizations also seem to be in demand these days as a kind of eye candy for capturing attention. But when we look at one engaging enough to hold our attention, we want to know what ... [Read more...]

Have you ever played the board game "Guess who?". For those who have not experienced childhood (because it might be the only reason to ignore this board game), this is a game consisting in trying to guess who the opponent player is thinking o... [Read more...]

Here is improved code for calculating QIC from geeglm in geepack in R (original post). Let me know how it works. I haven’t tested it much, but is seems that QIC may select overparameterized models. In the code below, I … Continue reading → [Read more...]