In fact, I’m going there with my family and some friends, including two probabilists (I mean professionals, I am merely an amateur), with this incredible challenge: will I be able to convince  probabilists to go to play at the Casino? Actually, I also want to study them carefully, to ... [Read more...]

Many of my research and personal interests lie in the realm of Machine Learning for several reasons. To me, it is the perfect blend of mathematics, statistics, and computer science. Also, it is extremely pervasive in today’s society. Everything from improved web-search to self-driving cars can be attributed to ... [Read more...]

Identifying project stakeholders and their requirements is a very important factor in the success of any project. Existing techniques tend to be very ad-hoc. In her PhD thesis Soo Ling Lim came up with a very interesting solution using social network analysis and what is more made her raw data ... [Read more...]

My new online forecasting book (written with George Athanasopoulos) is now completed. I previously described it on this blog nearly a year ago. In reality, an online book is never complete, and we plan to continually update it. But it is now at the point where it is suitable for ... [Read more...]

How does habitat diversity affect species richness? Perhaps intuition suggests that habitat diversity increases species richness by facilitating niche or resource partitioning among species. But, for a fixed area, as habitat heterogeneity increases, the area that can be allocated to each habitat type decreases. In a recent paper, Allouche and ... [Read more...]

A new Armadillo release 3.810.0 by Conrad appeared yesterday, and was wrapped up in a new release 0.3.810.0 of RcppArmadillo. Upstream changes bring FFT support as well as more Sparse matrix constructors, and we have an improvement to the sample() fu... [Read more...]

R can perform the usual mathematical operations, below are the functions:Arithmetic +    - addition-    - subtraction*    - multiplication/    - divisionTrigonometrysin    ... [Read more...]

How does habitat diversity affect species richness? Perhaps intuition suggests that habitat diversity increases species richness by facilitating niche or resource partitioning among species. But, for a fixed area, as habitat heterogeneity increases, the area that can be allocated to each habitat type decreases. In a recent paper, Allouche and ... [Read more...]

The results from the 2013 Future of Open Source Survey are in — thanks to everyone who contributed by completing the survey. You can read an overview of the results here, or see the detailed breakdowns in the slides at the end of this post. For me, one of the most interesting ... [Read more...]

After R is done running a long process, you may need to notify the operator to check the R console and provide the next commands. Without installing any more software or creating any batch files or VBS scripts, here is a simple way to create the popup notice in Windows ... [Read more...]

Daniel Kaplan and Libby Shoop have developed a one-credit class called Data Computation Fundamentals, which was offered this semester at Macalester College. This course is part of a larger research and teaching effort funded by Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) to help students … Continue reading → [Read more...]

It is extremely common to have a dataframe containing a bunch of variables, and to do the exact same thing to all of these variables. For instance, lets say we have a dataframe that has a bunch of limb bone measurements of different animals, and we wan... [Read more...]

[caption id="attachment_649" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Sitting with a data set with too many variables? The SVD can be a valuable tool when you're trying to sift through a large group of continuos variables. The image is CC by Jonas in China.[/caption] It can feel like a daunting task ... [Read more...]

Third Milano R net meeting took place on April, 18. More than thirty R users and a lot of enthusiasm! You can download presentations and view pictures of the meeting. If you attended the meeting, please leave a comment. Stay … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Photos of the third Milano R net meeting Milano; April 18, 2013 [Read more...]

Welcome presentation Nicola Sturaro, Consultant at Quantide (download PDF, 0.5 MB) Machine learning A case of digit recognition based on a shallow neural network implemented in R. Michele Vitali, Statistical consultant (download PDF, 0.2 MB) Chess betting odds How to develop … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I was Inspired from Ben Frys all Streets project. There he plotted all streets of the United States of America (about 240 million segments). I tried this first for the countries in Europe, France has about 22 million segments, with the goal to get an all street map of Europe. My data ... [Read more...]

Data - the econometrician's life-blood! Can't function without it.So, when a new source of data becomes available - especially one that's sophisticated, reliable, and FREE - it's time to sit up and take notice. Quandl is a recent Canadian start-up that delivers economic and financial time-series data, and then ... [Read more...]

I was fortunate enough to have been able to attend the Amazon AWS Summit in NYC and to listen to Werner Vogels give the keynote.  I will share a few of my thoughts on the AWS 2013 Summit and some of my take-aways.  I attended sessions that focused on two products ... [Read more...]

Google Summer of Code will be open for students on Monday, April 22.  The R Project has once again been selected as a mentoring organization , and a variety of mentors have proposed a number of projects for students to work on during this summer.  Here’s a bit about the program, ... [Read more...]