Last night we had a great meet up of the Montreal R User Group. I got things started with a little presentation asking the question “What does R do?” (slides). I made the presentation using Montreal R User Group member Ramnath Vaidyanathan‘s Slidify package. Slidify allows you to generate ... [Read more...]

My previous post on how to transform an organization into a more data-driven version of itself made a pretty big assumption that often doesn’t hold true. I assumed that people in the organization wanted their company or agency to become more data-driven. I think almost everyone says they want ... [Read more...]

If you often find yourself cutting-and-pasting charts or tables generated in R into PowerPoint or Keynote, you might want to take a look at Slidify. Created by R user Ramnath Vaidyanathan, Slidify is an R package that allows you to use R Markdown to define the slide content and automatically ... [Read more...]

In A Capitalist’s Dilemma, Whoever Wins on Tuesday, Clayton Christensen lays out three kinds of innovations through which an industry cycles: Empowering Innovations - those that offer products and services to a new customer base. The classic empowering (or disruptive) innovation is Ford Motor Company’s introduction of the ... [Read more...]

Last night this article by Chris Drummond of the Canadian National Research Council (Conseil national de recherches Canada) popped up in my Google Scholar alert. The title of the article, “Reproducible Research: a Dissenting Opinion” would seem to indicate that he disagrees … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Yesterday’s post showed a number of quick coding options for changing text in a basic ggplot. Here’s another two tricks for fine-tuning faceted plots. Again, let’s load our made up data about tooth growth (a real dataset in R, ToothGr... [Read more...]

I like to explore the graphics features of R.  Base graphics, ggplot2 are my favourites. On  other graphics packages, I haven’t used plotrix much. I am currently exploring grid package. Raptor First one is using ggplot2. (you could also do … Continue reading →The post Fun with R graphics: A ... [Read more...]

Today, I want to address some questions that I was getting regarding the Regime Detection post. In the Regime Detection post I showed an example based on the simulated data, and some of you tried to apply this example to actual stocks. There is one big problem that you have ... [Read more...]

We released Rcpp 0.10.0 earlier today. This post will just provide a simple example for one of the smaller new features -- the new namespace for functions from Rmath.h -- and illustrate one of the key features (Rcpp attributes) in passing. R, as a statistical language and environment, has very ... [Read more...]

Tomorrow at 9AM Pacific, Revolution Analytics VP of Product Development Sue Ranney will introduce two key Big Data features of the new Revolution R Enterprise 6.1. Now you can train classification and regression trees on data sets of unlimited size, quickly and using the resources of multiple processors and clusters. (This ... [Read more...]

My old job at the Health & Safety Laboratory is being advertised, and at a higher pay grade to boot.  (Though it is still civil service pay, and thus not going to make you rich.) You’ll need to have solid mathematical modelling skills, particularly solving systems of ODEs, and be ... [Read more...]

  The 2012 election is over and in the books. A few very close races remain to be officially decided, but for the most part everything has settled down over the last week. By all accounts it was a very good night for the Democrats, with wins in the presidency, senate and ... [Read more...]

Rcpp release 0.10.0 is now on CRAN and being uploaded to Debian. This is a new feature release, and we are very exciting about the changes, notably Rcpp attributes which make using C++ from R even easier than inline (see below as well as the new vignette for details and first ... [Read more...]

If you want to choose randomly your next holidays destination, you are likely to process in a way which is certainly biased. Especially if you choose randomly the latitude and the longitude. A bit like they do in this lovely advertising (For those of y... [Read more...]

I was at Strata New York 2012 last month. Great conference! Thanks O'Reilly media for assembling the industry leaders and running it well.I understand it was too crowded for some of my out-of-town friends. Stepping out to the streets of mid-town Manhat... [Read more...]

While I know there are several awesome guides for how to make fine-tuning adjustments to plot labels/axes/ticks/text in ggplot, this is still the most common question I get from people new to ggplot: how do I change the size/font/color/position of (som... [Read more...]

A postdoctoral researcher asked me the other day to help him expand a vector of comma delimited values so he could do computations in R with it. I wrote an R function to solve the problem. Here is the before... [Read more...]

I've wanted to create timeline maps with interactive googleVis Geomaps for a while. These would be a nice way to quickly show the spatial distribution of some data over time. It turns out that it's pretty easy to do with a plugin for Twitter Bootstra... [Read more...]

I’ve been interested in building a web app using R for a while, but never put any time into it until I was informed of the Shiny package.  It looked too easy, so I absolutely had to try it out. First you need to install the package from the ... [Read more...]