The following is a guest post from Joel Harrrison, PhD, consulting Aquatic Scientist.For a luddite like me, this is a big step – posting something on the inter-web.  I’m not on Facebook.  I don’t know what Twitter is.  Hell, I don’t even own a smartphone.  But, I’... [Read more...]

The Emacs Social Science Starter Kit is a drop-in collection of packages and settings for Emacs 24 aimed at people like me: that is, people doing social science data analysis and writing, using some combination of tools like R, git, LaTeX, Pandoc, perh... [Read more...]

How to Ask for Help using R How to Ask for Help using R The key to getting good help with an R problem is to provide a minimally working reproducible example (MWRE). Making an MWRE is really easy with R, and it will help ensure that those helping you ... [Read more...]

Regression is a mainstay of ecological and evolutionary data analysis. For example, a disease ecologist may use body size (e.g. a weight from a scale with measurement error) to predict infection. Classical linear regression assumes no error in covariates; they are known exactly. This is rarely the case in ... [Read more...]

It’s Memorial Day and my dissertation defense is tomorrow. This week I’m phoning in my blog. I had the opportunity to teach a short course last week that was part of a larger workshop focused on ecosystem restoration. A fellow grad student and I taught a session on ... [Read more...]

Been trying to reach the website for the useR! 2013, the R user conference that will be held July 10-12 2013 at University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain? There have been some server problems recently, but you can now get access at the official URL, www.r-project.org/useR-2013/. If you're going, ... [Read more...]

This is a guest article by Nina Zumel and John Mount, authors of the new book Practical Data Science with R. For readers of this blog, there is a 50% discount off the “Practical Data Science with R” book, simply by using the code pdswrblo when reaching checkout (until …Read more » [Read more...]

My recent update of gaoptim package brings up a new function, GAPerm, which can be used to perform combinatorial optimization using the Genetic Algorithm approach. The example below solves a TSP instance with 10 points around a circumference, the... [Read more...]

My recent update of gaoptim package brings up a new function, GAPerm, which can be used to perform combinatorial optimization using the Genetic Algorithm approach. The example below solves a TSP instance with 10 points around a circumference, the... [Read more...]

The fifth internation R/Finance conference was held last weekend. As one of the founding co-organizers, I may well be accussed of a little bias, but we think we once again pulled off a very nice and successful weekend-long event. Participants had ki... [Read more...]

I’m working on generating species distribution models at the moment for a few hundred species. Which means that I’m trying to automate as many steps as possible in R to avoid having to click buttons hundreds of times in ArcView. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

The USGS recently released a way to search for and get species occurrence records for the USA. The service is called BISON (Biodiversity Information Serving Our Nation). The service has a web interface for human interaction in a browser, and two APIs (application programming interface) to allow machines to interact ... [Read more...]

Sometimes, we might need to import all files, e.g. *.txt, with the same data layout in a folder without knowing each file name and then combine all pieces together. With the old method, we can use lapply() and do.call() functions to accomplish the task. However, when there are ... [Read more...]

A problem that many users face in R is storing the output from loop operations. In the case of Twitter, we may be requesting the last specified number of Tweets from a number of Twitter users. Several methods exist for … Continue reading → [Read more...]

For a recent project I needed to calculate the pairwise distances of a set of observations to a set of cluster centers. In MATLAB you can use the pdist function for this. As far as I know, there is no equivalent in the R standard packages. So I looked into ... [Read more...]

Introduction Last week, I wrote the first post in a series on exploratory data analysis (EDA).  I began by calculating summary statistics on a univariate data set of ozone concentration in New York City in the built-in data set “airquality” in R.  In particular, I talked about how to calculate ... [Read more...]

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A common way of illustrating the idea behind statistical power in null hypothesis significance testing, is by plotting the sampling distributions of the null hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis. Typically, these illustrations highlight the regions that correspond to making a type II error, type I error and correctly rejecting the ... [Read more...]

After last week's post bubble sort tuning I got an email from Berend Hasselman noting that my 'best' function did not protect against cases n [Read more...]

Today, I did a test run of parallel computing with snow and multicore packages in R and compared the parallelism with the single-thread lapply() function. In the test code below, a data.frame with 20M rows is simulated in a Ubuntu VM with 8-core CPU and 10-G memory. As the ... [Read more...]