In December my nice little netbook acquired a shiny new openSUSE 13.1, including all the goodies I might want to use in 2014; R, Stan, Julia and Jags. So here is what you might get when you set up a computer for statistics today.JagsI have been using J... [Read more...]

How much does statistical software help and how much it interferes when teaching statistical concepts? Software used in the practice of statistics (say R, SAS, Stata, etc) brings to the party a mental model that it’s often alien to students, while being highly optimized for practitioners. It is possible ... [Read more...]

Continuing on the theme of solar angles, the code given below produces an analemma diagram similar to that of Lynch (2012, figure 2).

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library(oce) loc [Read more...]

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What is often forgotten in the so-called data analysis "language wars” is that, across most of these languages, many common computations are performed using outsourced dynamically linked math libraries. For example, R; Python's Numpy; Julia; Matlab; and Mathematica all make heavy use of the BLAS linear algebra API. As a ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The Revolution R Enterprise 7.0 Getting started Guide makes a distinction between High Performance Computing (HPC) which is CPU centric, focusing on using many cores to perform lots of processing on small amounts of data, and High Performance Analytics (HPA), data centric computing that concentrates on feeding data ... [Read more...]

I had heard the name of the new technical computing language Julia buzzing around for some time already. Now during Christmas I had some time on my hands, and implemented the bubble sort algorithm that I have already posted about… See more › [Read more...]

The programs of the talks, posters and workshop are now printed and available on Speaker Deck (talks, posters, workshop). Please let me know if you spot anything wrong (even though it will not be reprinted!). This is presumably the last news item till Jan. 5 as I am almost off to ... [Read more...]

I wanted to use R to explore how to access and visualize census data, home value data and school rating data using Indianapolis metro area as an example. My learning objectives here are to learn how to use R to: … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Why would Bayesian statistics need a mascot/symbol/logo? Well, why not? I don’t know of any other branch of statistics that has a mascot but many programming languages have. R has an “R”, Python has a python snake, and Go has an adorable little gopher. While Bayesian statistics ... [Read more...]

In a previous post, I applied my rules-of-thumb for response time (RT) percentiles (or more accurately, residence time in queueing theory parlance), viz., 80th percentile: $R_{80}$, 90th percentile: $R_{90}$ and 95th percentile: $R_{95}$ to a cellphone application and found that the performance measurements were not completely consistent. Since the data ... [Read more...]

This article was first published on analyze stuff. It has been contributed to Anything but R-bitrary in celebration of its introductory post.By Max Ghenis Welcome to analyze stuff! For our first post, I wanted to reflect on the time of year; after all, ‘tis the season for hams and ... [Read more...]

OK, so I phoned it in last night. Final post and maybe this one will be a bit better. Can't recall what got me thinking about it, but I was running over the issue of school performance and the erroneous notion that small class sizes will produce better students. This ... [Read more...]

by Sheri Gilley, Principal UI Designer at Revolution Analytics Revolution R Enterprise DeployR is a server framework that exposes the R platform as a service allowing the integration of R statistics, analytics and visualizations inside Web, desktop and mobile applications. DeployR’s framework allows users to store and serve up ... [Read more...]

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Over the last few weeks I have been working on getting the Ziggurat normal random number generator updated and available in R. The Ziggurat generator provides a pretty unique combination of speed and good statistical properties for (standard) normal r... [Read more...]

Penultimate post, I'm going to take a quick look at the Gini indicator for wealth inequality. Data comes from the World Bank. I've downloaded the zipped file, decompressed it and given it a different name. I'm going to This will give us a decent set of data. How does this ... [Read more...]

by Thomas Dinsmore, Director of Product Management at Revolution Analytics The emergence of Apache Spark is a key development for Big Analytics in 2013. Spark, an Apache incubator project, is an open source distributed computing framework for advanced analytics in Hadoop. Originally developed as a research project at UC Berkeley's AMPLab, ... [Read more...]

Book title: Data Mining Applications with R Editors: Yanchang Zhao, Yonghua Cen Publisher: Elsevier Publish date: December 2013 ISBN: 978-0-12-411511-8 Length: 514 pages URL: http://www.rdatamining.com/books/dmar An edited book titled Data Mining Applications with R was released in December 2013, which … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Additional views of the stability of skewness and kurtosis of equity portfolios. Previously A post called “Four moments of portfolios” introduced the idea of looking at the stability of the mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis of portfolios through time. That post gave birth to a presentation at the London Quant ... [Read more...]