Last week, I posted about statisticians’ constant battle against the belief that the p-value associated (for example) with a regression coefficient is equal to the probability that the null hypothesis is true, for a null hypothesis that beta is zero or negative. I argued that (despite our long pedagogical practice) ... [Read more...]

I almost couldn’t bring myself to post this, but it’s April Fools’ Day, so I’ll never have a better opportunity. This Gist shows how to scrape “stats” and .PNG images from, erm, Bulbapedia, run a simple dimensionality reduction on those “stats,” and plot all 151 original Pokemon. I ... [Read more...]

In R, every comma matters. When creating a vector, c(1, 2, 5) will do the right thing, but add one unfortunate comma and c(1, 2, 5,) will greet you with a deadly Error in c(1, 2, 5, ) : argument 4 is empty. Other languages like Perl are less strict when defining basic data structures: having a comma after ... [Read more...]

In the early morning, especially here in Canada, I often see dew – water droplets formed by the condensation of water vapour on outside surfaces, like windows, car roofs, and leaves of trees.  I also sometimes see fog – water droplets or ice crystals that are suspended in air and often blocking ... [Read more...]

Harvard Professors Gary King and Stuart Shieber provide advice to graduate students about open access, dissertations, and journal publishing. They explain how freely available publications are essential to the scientific community, but also benefit your own career. King suggests a clever way of dealing with publisher copyright agreements to prevent ... [Read more...]

Introduction I was reading Michael Trosset’s “An Introduction to Statistical Inference and Its Applications with R”, and I learned a basic but interesting fact about the normal distribution’s interquartile range and standard deviation that I had not learned before.  This turns out to be a good way to ... [Read more...]

This morning, there was an interesting post entitled “why does Easter move around so much?” online on http://economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/… In my time series classes, I keep saying that sometimes, series can exhibit seasonlity, but the seasonal effect can be quite irregular. It is the cas for river ... [Read more...]

This is useful number if you have hundreds of PMIDs and need specific fields from the pubmed/medline citation. [crayon-533f1cc907809890104424/]   [Read more...]

There are number of ways in importing data into R, and several formats are available,From Excel to R From SPSS to RFrom Stata to R, and more hereIn this post, I'm going to talk about importing common data format that we often encounter, such as Excel, ... [Read more...]

RSAGA provides access to geocomputation capabilities of SAGA GIS from within R environment. Having SAGA GIS installed is a (quite obvious) pre-requirement to use RSAGA. In Linux x64 sometimes additional preparations are needed. In Linux SAGA as we... [Read more...]

The past two weeks I made a post regarding analyzing ordinal data with R and JAGS. The calculations in the second part made me realize I could actually get top two box intervals out of R. This demonstrated here. For that I needed the inv... [Read more...]

To enter data into R, two common and easy to use R functions are utilized.The concatenate function, c; and,The data.frame function.The concatenate function, c, is use for combining data points into a single numeric R object. The usage of this function ... [Read more...]

There are two ways to install R in Ubuntu. One is through the terminal, and the other is through the Ubuntu Software Center.Through TerminalPress Ctrl+Alt+T to open Terminal Then execute sudo apt-get update After that, sudo apt-get install r-baseT... [Read more...]

The R statistical package is available at CRAN website. In this site, do the followingClick the Download R for Windows. Then go to install R for the first time in the base subdirectory. And finally download the latest version of R for windows... [Read more...]

I have a $5 Starbucks gift card that I simply can't remember to use; I've had it since Christmas. So, I will mail it (within the U.S.A.) to the first commenter who can identify the longitude/latitude (within 5km) where two of these three vacation photos were taken (photos ... [Read more...]

The registration for R/Finance 2013 -- which will take place May 17 and 18 in Chicago -- is NOW OPEN!Building on the success of the previous conferences in 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012, we expect more than 250 attendees from around the world. R users from... [Read more...]

On Tuesday and Wednesday this week, the US Supreme Court heard two landmark cases related to same-sex marriage rights in this country. Simultaneously, to show solidarity for the cause of civil rights for gay members of society, thousands of Facebook users changed their profile pictures to a red equality symbol ... [Read more...]

In Riyadh I spent a rainy afternoon trying to work out how this was done (no, not really rainy but stayed indoors instead of driving about the desert). There's not much on the web about it. For at least a year people have been saying there will be an app ... [Read more...]

The annoucement below just went to the R-SIG-Finance list. More information is as usual at the R / Finance page: Now open for registrations: R / Finance 2013: Applied Finance with R May 17 and 18, 2013 Chicago, IL, USA The registration for R/Fin... [Read more...]

I wanted to play a bit Julia, the new language for technical computing, but no binaries were available yet for current versions of Ubuntu. So I decided to try and build them myself by backporting the julia 1.2.0 source package available in Sid and Raring. On Quantal, the packages were building ... [Read more...]