The New York City mayoral Democratic primary election is taking place this coming Tuesday (Sep. 10th) and there are several candidates in the running. Bill de Blasio is the front runner and is expected to win. However, there is a catch. Even if he takes the plurality of the vote ... [Read more...]

The following Github repo has the R code I put together that allows us to follow along and modify the great idea from Scannel & Kurz on app growth and it’s impact on yield. https://github.com/Btibert3/sk-delta-apps-yield/blob/master/README.md Take a look at the repo and ... [Read more...]

R has been featured in a couple of recent articles in the tech press. Last month, Data Informed's feature article 5 Key Considerations When Choosing Open Source Statistics Software suggested R for its analytics capabilities: Certainly, the statistical language R, for instance, is these days hugely popular—not least because it’... [Read more...]

*DANGER* This is just a silly blog and shouldn't be taken any seriously.*DANGER*Ok...you may wonder...why is Blag writing a silly blog? Well...I'm a Developer Evangelist...and it's my job to keep developers entertained  Also...I have so free time ... [Read more...]

R-bloggers is now offering a new “R jobs” post, that will be published (around) once a month. If you are interested in asking for a job to be posted on [Read more...]

05.09.2013 I released a new Windows version of Bio7. This release improves the general R plot functionality of Bio7. The default image plots are now displayed in a Image stack if more than one plot command is executed. In this way all plots are automatically openend and not only the last ... [Read more...]

To celebrate my last full month on the East Coast, I’m doing a bunch of talks. If you’re interested in hearing more about Julia or statistics in general, you might want to come out to one of the events I’ll be at: Julia Tutorial at DataGotham: On 9/12, ... [Read more...]

Thinknum.com is a new free data service similar to Quandl.com in that they organize and list publicly available data sets.  Currently they are using data from 2,000 data sources which sounds good compared with Quandl's 400+ source.  Overall, ... [Read more...]

Specifying a colClasses argument to read.table or read.csv can save time on importing data, while also saving steps to specify classes for each variable later.For example, loading a 893 MB took 441 seconds to load when not using colClasses, b... [Read more...]

In 2010, Crystal Palace FC were in administration and had 10 points deducted during the year. They only survived in the Championship on the last day of the season A year ago, they started the league with three consecutive losses and were relegation favourites. Fast forward 12 months and they are again strong ... [Read more...]

Functional languages allows us to treat functions as types. This brings us a distinct advantage of being able to write a code that generates further code, this practise is generally known as metaprogramming. As a functional language R project provides ... [Read more...]

Types and type conversion can be a tricky and intricate topic, and sometimes can lead to some real head-scratcher issues in R. Hence a somewhat confusing title.This is for people still relatively new to R, and I will skip some gory details. Actually I will skip most of them, ... [Read more...]

I am starting a new project that will require some serious text mining. So, in the interests of bringing myself up to speed on the tm package, I thought I would apply it to the Complete Works of William Shakespeare and just see what falls out. The first order of ... [Read more...]

I thought I could easily jump to a high standard (reproducibility), but I failed. Some of you may have noticed that the knitr book is finally out. Amazon is offering a good price at the moment, so if you are interested, you'd better hurry up. I a... [Read more...]

Last week, Revolution Analytics' US Chief Scientist Mario Inchiosa gave a presentation on high-performance predictive analytics in R and Hadoop, showing how Revolution R Enterprise 7 will bring the high-performance predictable algorithms of ScaleR to run on Cloudera and Hortonworks Hadoop clusters, while retaining the same easy-to-use interface from the R ... [Read more...]

The Beta distribution (and more generally the Dirichlet) are probably my favorite distributions.  However, sometimes only limited information is available when trying set up the distribution.  For example maybe you only know the lowest likely value, the highest likely value and the median, as a measure of center.  That information ... [Read more...]

For some reason someone dropped a pamphlet advertising SPSS for Windows 3.0 in my mail box at work. This means that the pamphlet, and the advertised version of SPSS, should be at least 20 years old! These days I’m happily using R for everything but if I was going to estimate ... [Read more...]

The best way to learn any software is to use it, and if you're new to Hadoop and want to try using Hadoop with R the process of setting up your own Hadoop cluster can be daunting (to say the least). But if learning is the goal, the key is ... [Read more...]

One of R’s biggest pitfalls is that eats up memory without letting it go.  This can be a huge problem if you are running really big jobs, have a lot of tasks  to run, or there are multiple users on your local computer or r server.  When I run ... [Read more...]

This post shows how to use Google Maps‘ API with R. Combine the first part with Plyr and it becomes a very powerful tool in just a few lines of code. You can find a gist in RMarkdown with the code here or click below to continue reading. The post ... [Read more...]