After searching for a few hours on the web, I’ve been able to get my R code working and plot breast cancer data on a world map. It might not the best looking map possible (R graphics is incredible!), but I am happy with that for now.To produce ... [Read more...]

For reasons beyond my understanding, the user 2013 committee didn’t register a domain name for the website, and the official address of the conference is: http://161.67.142.97/congresos/useR-2013/. Not only is this impossible to remember for humans, but it won’t show up in search engines. So I decided to ... [Read more...]

At the last LondonR meeting Francine Bennett from Mastodon C shared some of her experience and findings from an analysis of a large prescriptions data set of the UK's national health service (NHS). However, it was her last slide, which I found the most... [Read more...]

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 If you build an R lm model with a relatively large number of rows, you may be surprised by just how large that lm model is and what impact it has on your environment and application. Why might you care about size? ... [Read more...]

The only thing missing is the cryptic ID number.Well, the only bad thing is that I am trying to run a probabilistic graphical model on some real data, and having a crash like this will definitely slow things down. [Read more...]

More exciting news about MCMSki IV! First thing first, the 16 contributed sessions are now all-set, having gotten the stamp of approval from the scientific committee! Thanks to everyone who submitted a session proposal. (There were so many proposals that we alas had to reject some, as well as every single ... [Read more...]

The best part about writing a dissertation is finding clever ways to procrastinate. The motivation for this blog comes from one of the more creative ways I’ve found to keep myself from writing. I’ve posted about data mining in the past and this post follows up on those ... [Read more...]

Well, of course, this tip comes out one week after I needed it. The author uses the RCurl package to request the header of the shortened URL and then parse the "location" parameter on the return. This sort of operation tends to be needed frequently, es... [Read more...]

If you're creating a scientific graphic in the R language, there's a good chance you'll be wanting to include some mathematical symbols somewhere on the chart. You might want to use a symbol like μ as an axis label, annotate a curve with simple math like x2, or even put a ... [Read more...]

We’re in the Final Four now, the actual final four that matters (sorry sports forecasters). Last week, Coco got the chop, which made sense statistically (she had a huge relative risk AND had been the first queen to have had to lipsync four times) and from a narrative standpoint — ... [Read more...]

I was one of the 170 or so people at the Data Science hackathon in London over the weekend. As always this was well run by Carlos and his team who kept us fed, watered and connected to the Internet. One of the three challenges involved a dataset containing pairs of ... [Read more...]

[This article was first published on Quantifying Memory, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here) Want to share your [Read more...]

How good is the current opportunity to pick stocks relative to the past? Idea The more stocks act differently from each other relative to how volatile they are, the more opportunity there is to benefit by selecting stocks.  This post looks at a particular way of investigating that idea. Data ... [Read more...]

The gambler’s ruin problem is one where a player has a probability p of winning  and probability q of losing. For example let’s take a skill game where the player x can beat player y with probability 0.6 by getting closer to target. The game play begins with player ... [Read more...]

A new version of the OpenStreetMap package is now up on CRAN, and should propagate to all the mirrors in the next few days. The primary purpose of the package is to provide high resolution map/satellite imagery for use in your R plots. The package supports base graphics and ... [Read more...]

Introduction Today, I will discuss the alpha decay of americium-241 and use R to model the number of emissions from a real data set with the Poisson distribution.  I was especially intrigued in learning about the use of Am-241 in smoke detectors, and I will elaborate on this clever application.  ... [Read more...]

I’m often on the hunt for datasets that will not only work well with the material we’re covering in class, but will (hopefully) pique students’ interest. One sure choice is to use data collected from the students, as it is … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Today, the BayesComp section of ISBA launched its website. It is organised as a wiki and members of the section are strongly incited to take part into the construction of the website. To quote from Peter Green’s introduction: This new Wikidot site aims to be a community-edited resource on ... [Read more...]

In prior posts, I have demonstrated how to download, calculate, and compare fantasy football projections from ESPN, CBS, and NFL.com and how to calculate players' risk levels. In this post, I will demonstrate how... [Read more...]

Economists frequently use public datasets. One frequently used dataset is the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, short PSID, maintained by the Institute of Social Research at the University of Michigan.I'm introducing psidR, which is a small helper packag... [Read more...]