Here is the cover of the Japanese translation of our Introducing Monte Carlo methods with R book.  A few year after the French translation. It actually appeared last year in August but I was not informed of this till a few weeks ago. The publisher is Maruzen, with an associated ... [Read more...]

My last post discussed a technique for integrating functions in R using a Monte Carlo or randomization approach. The mc.int function (available here) estimated the area underneath a curve by multiplying the proportion of random points below the curve by the total area covered by points within the interval: ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from April of particular interest to R users: A critique of a SAS whitepaper comparing the performance of SAS, R and Mahout. A video presentation from statistician Tess Nesbitt at UpStream, who uses GAM survival models in R for marketing attribution ... [Read more...]

Over the past few days, I have been introduced to a few new-to-me R packages, via some comments from the Shiny guys and the R-bloggers site. This seems a rather haphazard way of acquiring knowledge and I cannot be alone in thinking that this is not the most productive way ... [Read more...]

Stack Exchange is a series of question-and-answer sites, including Stack Overflow for programming and Cross Validated for statistics. I was introduced to these sites at a short talk by Barry Rowlingson at the 2011 UseR! meeting, “Why R-help must die!“ These sites have a lot of advantages over R-help: The format ... [Read more...]

I was recently asked by a client to create a large number of “proof of concept” visualizations that illustrated the power of R for compiling and analyzing disparate datasets. The client was specifically interested in automated analyses of global data. A little research led me to the WDI package. The ... [Read more...]

How to have a better chance of a good outcome. Making mistakes There’s been a lot of talk recently about data analysis problems with spreadsheets.  If you’ve not stuck your head out of your cave lately, then you can catch some of the discussion by doing an internet ... [Read more...]

Most of my work recently has involved downloading large datasets of species occurrences from online databases and attempting to smoodge1 them together to create distribution maps for parts of Australia. Online databases typically have a ridiculous number of columns with … Continue reading → [Read more...]

In prior posts, I demonstrated how to download, calculate, and compare fantasy football projections from ESPN, CBS, and NFL.com.  In my last post, I demonstrated how to download FantasyPros projections, which aggregate projections from many different sources to increase prediction accuracy.  In this post, I will compare fantasy football ... [Read more...]

Update: Okay. I've uploaded a new template and things seem to be fine now. Update: I am aware the table of contents is not being displayed in bullet form as I intended. The web template I'm using seems to be buggy. It also seems to think this page is in ... [Read more...]

A couple of days ago, I had an opportunity to give a guest lecture on our Rcpp package for R and C++ integration. This was in CMSC 12300 Computer Science with Applications-3 in the Department of Computer Science at University of Chicago. The course i... [Read more...]

Following Le Monde puzzle #810, I tried to code an R program (not reproduced here) to optimise an awalé game but the recursion was too rich for R: even with a very small number of holes and seeds in the awalé… Searching on the internet, it seems the computer simulation of ... [Read more...]

One reason I like using R for data analysis is that R has a great collection of packages that let you easily apply state-of-the-art methods to your problems. But once in a while you find a library that you would like to use that does not have a R wrapper, ... [Read more...]

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Preparing and reshaping data is the ever continuing task of a data analyst. Luckily we have many tools for it. The default tool in R would be reshape(), although this is so user friendly that a reshape package has been added too. I try to use reshape()... [Read more...]

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

In my courses on R, I usually show how to insert a picture as a background for a graph. But it is also to see the picture as an object, and to insert it in a graph everywhere we like to see it, as explained on the awesome blog http://... [Read more...]

When I first saw a graphic made from Yihui’s animation package (Xie, 2013) I was amazed at the magic and thought “I could never do that”. Passage of time… One night I found myself bored and as usual avoiding work. … Continue reading → [Read more...]

With Stéphane Tufféry, we were working this week on a chapter of a book, entitled Statistical Learning in Actuarial Science. The chapter should be based on R functions, and we wanted to reproduce some outputs he previously obtained with SAS. The good thing is that even complex functions (... [Read more...]

As noted on paragraph 18.4.1 of the book Veterinary Epidemiologic Research, logistic regression is widely used for binary data, with the estimates reported as odds ratios (OR). If it’s appropriate for case-control studies, risk ratios (RR) are preferred for cohort studies as RR provides estimates of probabilities directly. Moreover, it ... [Read more...]