# I am interested in how small bits of individualized instructions can create collective action.# In this simulation I will give a single instruction to each individual in the swarm.# Choose another individual who is not too close, then accelerate towards that individual.# I also control momentum causing the previous movement ... [Read more...]

Noam Ross recently shared a very useful guide to speeding up your R code. Get a bigger computer (for example, renting an instance on the Amazon cloud for a few cents an hour) Use parallel programming techniques Using the R byte-compiler Profiling and benchmarking your code Using high-performance packages (like ... [Read more...]

If you’re not using version control, you should be. Learn git. If you’re not on github, you should be. That’s real open source. To help some colleagues get started with git and github, I wrote a minimal tutorial. There are lots of git and github resources available, ... [Read more...]

I've recently managed to reproduce my first charts using the nice package rNVD3 from Ramnath Vaidyanathan: https://github.com/ramnathv/rNVD3 This rNVD3 package uses NVD3, which provides re-usable charts with d3.js, without taking away the power that... [Read more...]

Please note that this is programming I purely did for the learning experience. The pure R bubble sort implemented in this post is veeeeery slow for two reasons: Interpreted code with lots of iteration is very slow. Bubble sort is… See more › [Read more...]

Yesterday I submitted a new version (marked 2.0-0) of package ‘intergraph’ to CRAN. There are some major changes and bug fixes. Here is a summary: The package supports “igraph” objects created with ‘igraph’ version 0.6-0 and newer (vertex indexing starting from 1, not 0) only! Main functions for converting network data between ... [Read more...]

Disclosure: I am not a health care professional, but just some one interested in playing with data and ways to represent them. I am not going to interpret findings here, but will make a remark or two about how to interpret them from the few graphs... [Read more...]

The last two weeks have been full of changes for me. For those who’ve been asking about what’s next, I thought I’d write up a quick summary of all the news. (1) I successfully defended my thesis this past Monday. Completing a Ph.D. has been a massive ... [Read more...]

I have had some work on CRAN stats on the back-burner but the recent article How R Grows tempted me to push it up the list In the interim, I have a couple of comments on Joseph Rickert`s article. Although the body of the article refers to packages either ... [Read more...]

Marcus Beck has a nice (& relatively new) blog called R is My Friend. You can guess that his posts relate to the use of R.I particularly liked his piece on the use of the XML package in R to mine data from the internet; and his post on using ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Even a casual glance at the R Community Calendar shows an impressive amount of R user group activity throughout the world: 45 events in April and 31 scheduled so far for May. New groups formed last month in Knoxville, Tennessee (The Knoxville R User Group: KRUG) and Sheffield in ... [Read more...]

In survey research, our datasets nearly always comprise variables with mixed measurement levels – in particular, nominal, ordinal and continuous, or in R-speak, unordered factors, ordered factors and numeric variables. Sometimes it is useful to be able to do blanket tests of one set of variables (possibly of mixed level) against ... [Read more...]

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The initial version of the timeline package has been released to CRAN. This package provides creates timeline plots using ggplot2 in a style similar to Preceden. I would considered this beta quality as there are more features I would like to add but has enough functionality to possibly be useful ... [Read more...]

Today the front page of the Huffington Post featured the new data available from the CMS that shows the cost of many popular procedures broken down by hospital. We here at Simply Statistics think you should be able to explore … Continue reading → [Read more...]

If you missed last week's webinar, product manager Thomas Dinsmore shared details of the new features in Revolution R Enterprise 6.2 in the video below: You can also download slides of the presentation at the link below. Revolution Analytics webinars: What's New in Revolution R Enterprise 6.2 [Read more...]

Everyone loves to aggregate data. Everyone loves to create new columns based on other columns. Everyone hates to do the same thing twice. In my continuing work on multilevel view of loss reserving, I reached a point where I realized that I needed a robust mechanism to aggregate computed columns. ... [Read more...]

Previously, I talked about genetic algorithms (GA) for feature selection and illustrated the algorithm using a modified version of the GA R package and simulated data. The data were simulated with 200 non-informative predictors and 12 linear effects and three non-linear effects. Quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA) was used to model the data. ... [Read more...]

This tutorial has been kindly contributed by Robin Edwa [...] [Read more...]

Has learning R been driving you a bit crazy? If so, it may be that you’re “lost in translation.” On June 17 and 19, I’ll be teaching a webinar, R for SAS, SPSS and Stata Users. With each R concept, … Continue reading → [Read more...]