It is the eve of the New York City Democratic mayoral primary election.  This is a simple follow-up on my post from last Friday as I was curious how the final pre-Election Day polling was going to fall.  It’s fairly clear who is going to get the most votes.  ... [Read more...]

Larry Wasserman, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is a graduate of University of Toronto, a COPSS Award winner, and a leading statistician in Bayesian analysis and inference. In this post, he discusses his views on the question Is Bayesian Inference a Religion? Two people will each spend 15 consecutive minutes in ... [Read more...]

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

Graphic modeling can be nerve-stretching and stressful. eoda’s R academy will help you to manage and facilitate your work concerning graphic modeling as there are multiple possibilities to visualize contents appealingly. R provides features to create several kinds of graphics like boxplots, histograms, or scatterplots. The following graphics shall ... [Read more...]

Hey there! After my post about sentiment analysis using the Viralheat API I found another service. Datumbox ist offering special sentiment analysis for Twitter. But this API doesn´t just offer sentiment analysis, it offers a much more detailed analysis. „The currently supported API functions are: Sentiment Analysis, Twitter Sentiment ... [Read more...]

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Despite the refreshing change that the journal PLOS ONE represents in terms of open access and an refreshing change to the stupidity that is quality/novelty selection by the two or three people that review a paper, it’s submission requirements are far less progressive. Yes they make you jump ... [Read more...]

each year ending in a two or a seven, census bureau employees stow away their eponymous decennial population count to focus on the economic census.  and when charged with gauging the health of the american economy, who better to survey than busine... [Read more...]

The Metropolis algorithm, and its generalization (Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) provide elegant methods for obtaining sequences of random samples from complex probability distributions. When I first read about modern MCMC methods, I had trouble visualizing the convergence of Markov chains in higher dimensional cases. So, I thought I might put together a ... [Read more...]

While coding ensemble methods in data mining with R, e.g. bagging, we often need to generate many data and models objects with sequential names. Below is a quick example how to use assign() function to generate many prediction objects on the fly and then retrieve these predictions with mget() ... [Read more...]

Continuing with my exploration of mixed models I am now at the first part of random coefficients: example 59.5 for proc mixed (page 5034 of the SAS/STAT 12.3 Manual). This means I skipped examples 59.3 (plotting the likelihood) and 59.4 (known G and R)... [Read more...]

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# Maximum likelihood Estimation (MLE) is a powerful tool in econometrics which allows for the consistent and asymptotically efficient estimation of parameters given a correct identification (in terms of distribution) of the random variable. # It i... [Read more...]

One of the approaches to graph drawing is application of so called force-directed algorithms. In its simplest form the idea is to layout the nodes on plane so that all edges in the graph have approximately equal length. This problem has very intuitive ... [Read more...]

This morning, Benoit sent me an email, about an exercise he found in an econometric textbook, about linear regression. Consider the following dataset, Here, variable X denotes the income, and Y the expenses. The goal was to fit a linear regression (actually, in the email, it was mentioned that we ... [Read more...]

Vectors are at the heart of R and represent a true convenience. Moreover, vectors are essential for good performance especially when your are working with lots of data. We’ll explore these concepts in this posting. As a motivational example let’s generate a sequence of data from -3 to 3. ... [Read more...]

After my last post about the stringdist package, Zachary Mayer pointed out to me that the implementation of the Levenshtein and Jaro-Winkler distances implemented in the RecordLinkage package are about two-three times faster. His benchmark compares randomly generated character strings … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Well, not really a doozy.  Just something nice and slow to get me going. So, seeing as I intend to post stuff about R along with the other things, I thought it best to understand how all those great R bloggers embed the highlighted R code into their WordPress blogs.  ... [Read more...]

Back in June I discovered pqR, Radford Neal’s fork of R designed to improve performance. Then in July, I heard about Tibco’s TERR, a C++ rewrite of the R engine suitable for the enterprise. At this point it dawned on me that R might end up like SQL, ... [Read more...]

R packages to provide more interactive and richer user experience: knitr, rCharts, slidify, shiny and OpenCPU. [Read more...]