The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the United States enables property owners in participating communities to purchase insurance protection from the government against losses from flooding (h... [Read more...]

As if the R world needed another example of Twitter visualizations, right? Well, here we go anyway.At the beginning of 2013, Pablo Barberá released the first version of his R package 'streamR' (CRAN link). With this package, you can tap into the streaming capabilities of the Twitter API. I did ... [Read more...]

I read a series of articles related to the goings of the UK housing market, the likely effects of the new Help To Buy scheme, the 10% increase in mean London house price over the last year, and employment statistics. I failed to reproduce some numbers cited in the economist (below). ... [Read more...]

These are beta version because the help manuals are not written yet.  Their functions are already matured to the releasse stage.  I will put them to CRAN as soon as … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Recently, Yu-Sung Su and Masanao Yajima, the developers of the R2jags package, have released a new version (the current one is 0.03-11). As far as I understand it, one of the main changes is that since the update, R2jags no longer depend... [Read more...]

A new release of the BH package is now on CRAN and its mirrors. BH provides (a subset of) the Boost library for C++, particularly the (large) parts delivered as pure template headers not requiring linking. When this package is installed, an R pack... [Read more...]

Say that you are implementing a non-linear regression analysis, which is shortly described by wikipedia as:"In statistics, nonlinear regression is a form of regression analysis in which observational data are modeled by a function which is a nonlinear ... [Read more...]

This is a basic question when you (as a programmer or biologist or mass spectrometrist) start a career in bioinformatics. What is your favorite programming language in bioinformatics?. This pool will give you a short picture about which languages are m... [Read more...]

Dan Gerlanc writes: I read your post the other day [now the other month, as our blog is on a bit of a delay] on helping psychologists do research and thought you might be interested in our R package, “bootES”, for robust effect size calculation and confidence interval estimation using ... [Read more...]

I recently enjoyed reading O’Hara, R. B., & Kotze, D. J. (2010). Do not log-transform count data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 1(2), 118–122. doi:10.1111/j.2041-210X.2010.00021.x. The article prompted me to think about processes involving discrete events and how these might be presented graphically. I am not talking about counts (... [Read more...]

Those are Williams designs you might say, but it has become clear to me that Williams designs are just a subset of all carry-over balanced designs. Not through hard work of mine, comments by Apn on my previous post Creating Williams designs with e... [Read more...]

What happens if you ask for too much power from Markdown? R Markdown is one of the document formats that knitr supports, and it is probably the most popular one. I have been asked many times about the choice between Markdown and LaTeX, so I think I'... [Read more...]

This post shares the video from the talk presented in October 2013 by Phil Brierley on techniques to improve the accuracy of predictive models at Melbourne R Users. The Heritage Health Prize was a two year predictive analytics competition that … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Two interesting articles in recent issues of The Atlantic linked sports to tax-payer dollars. The first few lines of Gregg Easterbrook’s article, titled How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers, were: “Taxpayers fund the stadiums, antitrust law doesn't apply to broadcast deals, the league enjoys nonprofit status, and Commissioner Roger Goodell ... [Read more...]

I’ve been looking for template reports using R and Knitr for a while but I didn’t find anything that suits my needs so far. I therefore decided to create them myself. What I like to see about trading strategies are basic performance charts (daily, monthly and yearly), some ... [Read more...]

Forbes has published an article today on the integration between Alteryx and Revolution R Enterprise, which gives business analysts the ability to drag and drop to connect data sources to R-based models, such as this one for Market Basket analysis: (Experienced R users can always drill down to see the ... [Read more...]

After some delay, we are happy to finally get version 1.1 of the likert package on CRAN. Although labeled 1.1, this is actually the first version of the package released to CRAN. After receiving some wonderful feedback from useR! this year, we held back releasing until we implemented many of the feature ... [Read more...]

We are currently advertising for three academic positions, suitable for recent PhD graduates. Lecturer (Applied Statistics or Operations Research) Five-year position with MAXIMA and the School of Mathematical Sciences Two positions available. Applications close 31 October. More information. Lecturer (Econometrics/Business Statistics) Continuing position with the Department of Econometrics and Business ... [Read more...]

Before my daughter was born, I thought that my wife and I would have to send her to a licensed child care centre somewhere in Toronto.  I had heard over and over how long of a waiting list I should … Continue reading → [Read more...]

We're getting ready for this year's R/Finance conference.  Here's the call for papers.  I hope to see you there!R/Finance 2014: Applied Finance with RMay 16 and 17, 2014University of Illinois at ChicagoThe sixth annual R/Finance conference fo... [Read more...]