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Google Summer of Code has now opened for student applications, and the R Project has once again been selected as a mentoring organization.  I’ve discussed before that a variety of mentors have proposed a number of projects for students to work on during this summer, but I wanted to ... [Read more...]

Data from slides on Bloomberg businessweek's site: http://images.businessweek.com/slideshows/2012-09-26/americas-50-best-citiesIn this post, I show how one can interact with a dataset and generate graphs on the fly (technically, I've predetermined... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Baseball fans have been serious about statistics since Carl Pearson was a young man (although I doubt that Carl followed the game). It is not clear, though, exactly when baseball statisticians moved from doing descriptive stats into predictive analytics. In his book Super Crunchers, Ian Ayers credits ... [Read more...]

Context awareness seems to be everywhere, and everyone seems to be saying that context matters.  Gartner foresees "a game-changing opportunity" in what it calls context-aware computing.  The title of their report states it best, "Context Shap... [Read more...]

Word cloud of DOMA hearing transcriptsI must admit, there is something appealing about the word cloud - that is, until you try to understand what it actually means...Word clouds are pervasive - even in the science world. I was somewhat spurred to wri... [Read more...]

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I promised in Episode 166 that I’d review this beer with a bit more detail than my usual quick spiel on the show, so allow me to present: End of the World Midnight Wheat! An ale brewed with “midnight wheat, chocolate malt, chili and spice” from Shock Top (aka Anheuser-Busch) ... [Read more...]

The deadline for my book on R is fast approaching, so naturally I’m in full procrastination mode.  So much so that I’ve spent this evening creating a brainfuck interpreter for R.  brainfuck is a very simple programming language: you get an array of 30000 bytes, an index, and just 8 ... [Read more...]

Amazon is currently making the first edition of Bayesian Computation with R (Use R) by Jim Albert available for free on Kindle. I own a copy of the book and there is a lot of good content and R examples on how one can do general Bayesian statistics.  The R ... [Read more...]

Several R packages provide an interface to query map services (Google Maps, Stamen Maps or OpenStreetMap) to obtain raster images …Continuar leyendo » [Read more...]

We are pleased to announce that Revolution R Enterprise Release 6.2 is available to new subscribers today. This new software release from Revolution Analytics includes a number of key new features: Support for open source R 2.15.3, the latest stable release of R. Since Release 2.14.2, the R Project has added 89 new features, 11 ... [Read more...]

I managed to catch David Spiegelhalter’s Tails You Win on BBC iplayer last week. I missed it the first time round, only for my parents on my last visit home to tell me about a Statistician jumping out of a … Continue reading → [Read more...]

We share our opinion that = should be preferred to the more standard [Read more...]

In loss forecasting, it is often necessary to disaggregate annual losses into each quarter. The most simple method to convert low frequency to high frequency time series is interpolation, such as the one implemented in EXPAND procedure of SAS/ETS. In the example below, there is a series of annual ... [Read more...]

If you didn't manage to catch Coursera's Data Analysis course, don't despair. Instructor Jeff Leek has made the course videos available on YouTube, which you can review at your leisure to learn how to plan, carry out, and communicate analyses of real data sets with R. (The course assumes you ... [Read more...]

I’m a big fan of open-source software for research. For example, R-statistics, Qgis, and Grass GIS are awesome programs. R can do any statistical tests and numerical modeling you can imagine; if there’s not a built-in function you can write … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Here are my slides from a short introductory seminar on R (essentially going through part I of the R tutorial) last week. As magic lantern pictures go, they’re hideously ugly, but they were mostly there for future reference. Most of the seminar was spent showing RStudio. This Friday, we’... [Read more...]

Earlier this month we blogged about Harvard Professors Gary King and Stuart Shieber providing advice to graduate students about open access, dissertations, and journal publishing. We also mentioned some of the great initiatives that facilitate open access publishing in the statistics community, like the Journal of Statistical Software (JSS), The ... [Read more...]

For some cryptic reason I needed a function that calculates function values on sliding windows of a vector. Googling around soon brought me to ‘rollapply’, which when I tested it seems to be a very versatile function. However, I wanted to code my own version just for vector purposes in ... [Read more...]