As R has evolved over the past 20 years its capabilities have improved in every area. The visual display of time series is no exception: as the folks from Timely Portfolio note that: Through both quiet iteration and significant revolutions, the volunteers of R have made analyzing and charting time series ... [Read more...]

I wanted to avoid advanced topics in this post and focus on some “blocking and tackling” with R in an effort to get novices started.  This is some of the basic code I found useful when I began using R just over 6 weeks ago. Reading in data from a .csv ... [Read more...]

The 8th iteration of the DREAM Challenges are underway. DREAM is something like the Kaggle of computational biology with an open science bent. Participating teams apply machine learning and statistical modeling methods to biological problems, competing to achieve the best predictive accuracy. This year's three challenges focus on reverse engineering ... [Read more...]

There are different ways of specifying and running Bayesian models from within R. Here I will compare three different methods, two that relies on an external program and one that only relies on R. I won’t go into much detail about the differences in syntax, the idea is more ... [Read more...]

Introduction Continuing my recent series on exploratory data analysis (EDA), and following up on the last post on the conceptual foundations of empirical cumulative distribution functions (CDFs), this post shows how to plot them in R.  (Previous posts in this series on EDA include descriptive statistics, box plots, kernel density ... [Read more...]

I’ve uploaded a draft tutorial on some aspects of prediction using point processes. I wrote it using R-Markdown, so there’s bits of R code for readers to play with. It’s hosted on Rpubs, which turns out to be a great deal more convenient than WordPress for that ... [Read more...]

Just how many (bad) -omics are there anyway? Let’s find out. 1. Get the raw data It would be nice if we could search PubMed for titles containing all -omics: However, we cannot since leading wildcards don’t work in PubMed search. So let’s just grab all articles from 2013: ... [Read more...]

Two weeks ago, I was looking for ways to make pretty maps for my own research project. A quick search led me to some very informative blog posts by Kim Gilbert, David Smith and Max Marchi. Eventually, I Google'd the excellent crime weather map exa... [Read more...]

As part of developing pqR, I wrote a suite of speed tests for R. Some of these tests were used to show how pqR speeds up simple real programs in my post announcing pqR, and to show the speed-up obtained with helper threads in pqR on systems with multiple processor ... [Read more...]

Introduction Continuing my recent series on exploratory data analysis (EDA), this post focuses on the conceptual foundations of empirical cumulative distribution functions (CDFs); in a separate post, I will show how to plot them in R.  (Previous posts in this series include descriptive statistics, box plots, kernel density estimation, and ... [Read more...]

On analyticbridge, the question was posed about moving an inner join from Excel (which was taking many minutes via VLOOKUP()) to some other package.  The question asked what types of performance can be expected in other systems.  Of the list ... [Read more...]

A new version of Rcpp is now on the CRAN network for GNU R; binaries for Debian have been uploaded as well. This release brings a fairly large number of fixes and improvements across a number of Rcpp features, see below for the detailed list. We a... [Read more...]

If you know a beer you like and want some recommendations for a style of beer to try, check out the yhat Beer Recommender: This neat little app is the product of a recommendation system built using the R language by the folks behind the yhat blog. It's based on ... [Read more...]

On Thursday of last week I gave a short informal talk to Stat Bytes, the CMU Statistics department‘s twice a month computing seminar. Quick tricks for faster R code: Profiling to Parallelism Abstract: I will present a grab bag of … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I wanted to extend my car weight distribution calculation of June 16 from only 2000 to years 2000 to 2013. Unfortunately, come Sunday afternoon the code seemed too slow and not even the beginning of a post. So, I went on to another calculation I w... [Read more...]

I’ve been using Thomas Leeper‘s MTurkR package to administer my most recent Mechanical Turk study—an extension of work on representative-constituent communication claiming credit for pork benefits, with Justin Grimmer and Sean Westwood.  MTurkR is excellent, making it quick and easy to: test … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Introduction A few first posts of this blog will demonstrate how to build each report hosted by the business intelligence (BI) application dashboard shown below (see Fig. 1). This application uses the following tools and technologies R – a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, ASP.NET MVC4 – a free ... [Read more...]

This is the last time I will talk about visualizing the best cities of 2012 based on Bloomberg Businessweek's rankings. In an earlier post on this topic, interactive applications to plot bar graphs and histograms for different characteristics... [Read more...]

I’ve recently started experimenting with making Shiny apps, and today I wanted to make a basic app for calculating and visualizing principal components analysis (PCA). Here is the basic interface I came up with. Test drive the app for yourself using the code below or  check out the the ... [Read more...]

One innovative feature of pqR (my new, faster, version of R), is that it can perform some numeric computations in “helper” threads, in parallel with other such numeric computations, and with interpretive operations performed in the “master” thread. This can potentially speed up your computations by a factor as large ... [Read more...]