One of the myriad of reasons we created the Data Driven Security blog was to provide pointers to data analysis and visualization resources for security domain experts who may have not been exposed to these types of tools. I’d venture a posit that most folks jump into some type ... [Read more...]

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I often use Amazon EC2 to store and retrieve data when I need either additional storage or higher computing capacity.  In this tutorial I’ll share how to connect to a MySQL database so that one can retrieve the data and do the analysis.  I tend to use either TOAD ... [Read more...]

We’ve noticed through the magic of download statistics that we have a nice cluster of listeners in the DC metro area. With Patrick always nearby and Ryan in town for a bit, we figured a meet up would be fun. So on Thursday, January 9th, starting around 7:30pm EST ... [Read more...]

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

by Uday Tennety: Director, Advanced Analytics Services at Revolution Analytics The R ecosystem has become widely popular lately with large players such as Pivotal, Tibco, Oracle, IBM, Teradata and SAP integrating R into their product suites. All these big players are using value chain integration and platform envelopment strategies to ... [Read more...]

The afternoon sessions I attended were “Computational and Methodological Challenges in evidence synthesis and multi-step” organised by Nicky Best and Sylvia Richardson and “Approximate inference” put together by Dan Simpson. Since both Nicky and Sylvia were alas unable to attend MCMSki, I chaired their session, which I found most interesting ... [Read more...]

As mentioned in my previous post , in this post I will be listing out the tools, blogs and forums, online courses that I have gathered over the past one year, which I felt necessary in my journey, which will be helpful to my fellow data science aspirants. Skillset Required: Knowledge ... [Read more...]

Towards the basic R mindset. Previously The post “A first step towards R from spreadsheets” provides an introduction to switching from spreadsheets to R.  It also includes a list of additional posts (like this one) on the transition. Add two columns Figure 1 shows some numbers in two columns and the ... [Read more...]

The Christmas and New Year's break is over, yet there is still time to return unwanted presents. Return to Santa was the title of an article in the Economist that highlighted the impact on online retailers, as return rates can be alarmingly high. The article quotes a study by Christian ... [Read more...]

In the introduction to the time series course (MAT8181) this morning, we did spend some time on the expression of (deterministic) sequences defined using a linear recurence (we will need that later on, so I wanted to make sure that those results were familiar to everyone). First order recurence The ... [Read more...]

Statistical learning theory offers an opportunity to those of us trained as social science methodologists to look at everything we have learned from a different perspective. For example, missing value imputation can be seen as matrix completion and rec... [Read more...]

Today, I got a license of the new Stata/MP 13 (dual core), so I decided to make some succinct comparisons with R (Rstudio). Much more tests will come in the following weeks, but today I focused only on the basics: processing text files. Essentially, reading and writing raw datasets. The ... [Read more...]

A new major release 4.000 of Armadillo came out out yesterday morning. This is a new stable release by Conrad with a new major number, and it brings a few nice changes as detailed below. I rolled up RcppArmadillo version 0.400 yesterday morning, an... [Read more...]

Rainfall data used by researchers in academia and industry does not always come in the same format. Data is often in atypical formats and in extremely large number of files and there is not always guidance on how to obtain, process and visualize the da... [Read more...]

2013 was a tough year. Trading was tough, with one of my strategies experiencing a significant drawdown. Research was tough – wasted a lot of time on machine learing techneques, without much to show for it. Also made some expensive mistakes, so all in all – it was a year I’d prefer ... [Read more...]

I have to admit it...I'm an R junkie...since the first time I started learning R...it has become an addiction to me...I try to solve every problem with R...which is obviously not the best way to go...but my rule of thumb is..."Try with R ... [Read more...]

While grading some homework it became apparent that many of the idioms of R are not widely known and aren’t …Continue reading » [Read more...]

The S&P 500 returned 29.6% in 2013.  How might that have varied? S&P weights There are many features that could vary — here we will keep the same constituents (almost) and weights with similar sizes but that are randomly assigned rather than based on market capitalization. That is, we want the large ... [Read more...]

The Guardian Newspaper has an interesting article about the Pisa (Program for International Student Assessment) scores for 2012, and it includes data. Since I was interested to see how my own region scored, I downloaded the data into a file called PISA-summary-2012.csv and created a plot summarizing scores in all ... [Read more...]