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GMT (Generic Mapping Tools) (http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/) is a great mapping tool. I'm hoping to use it more in the future, but for the meantime I wanted to recreate some of the it's standard color palettes in R. Unfortunately, I couldn't find documen... [Read more...]

I haven’t done much “googling” before posting, so this topic might have been covered elsewhere but I think it’s  really worth sharing or repeating anyway. A lot has been written about the source of  ETF returns (some insights might be found here). In a nutshell some analysis found ... [Read more...]

Analysis District-by-district data reveal that if the Bloc Quebecois, Green, Liberal, and NDP parties were to have been united, the Conservative party would have lost the 41st Canadian election by a dramatic measure, instead of winning a majority. The graph given below shows the results by naming the ridings. Clicking ... [Read more...]

In the last two days I was able to download and install a great stack of software from Atlassian, which would theoretically allow a small team of 5-10 people to organize software development on enterprise-grade tools: JIRA for issue tracking … Weiterlesen → [Read more...]

Sublime Text is an extremely powerful text editor. Currently I use Sublime Text 3 and quite enjoy its simplicity and extensibility. In this blog, I would like to introduce some of my favorite packages that leverage my productivity. Package Control Sublime Text is by default equipped with its package manager: Package ... [Read more...]

About 6 months ago, I wrote a package for the R programming language called rNOMADS.  It interfaces with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s Operational Archive and Distribution System (NOMADS), comprising everything from global weather forecast models, to high resolution regional models, to wave and sea ice models.  rNOMADS uses ... [Read more...]

Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani are teaching an online class on Statistical Learning starting this week. The first week is introduction and overview, so it's not too late to join up. They've also published a new book, An Introduction to Statistical Learning, as a more accessible companion to their widely ... [Read more...]

Want to see how you can use a drag-and-drop user interface to run and share R code? Check out our webinar next Wednesday January 29 (hosted by Alteryx and Revolution Analytics): Creating Value That Scales with Revolution Analytics & Alteryx. In the webinar, Dan Putler (Alteryx's Data Artisan in Residence) will demonstrate ... [Read more...]

If you have an interest in forecasting, especially economic forecasting, the Rob Hyndman's name will be familiar to you. Hailing from my old stamping ground - Monash University - Rob is one of the world's top forecasting experts.  Without going into all of the details, Rob is very widely published, ... [Read more...]

These days I became interested in financial data, such as stock price, exchange rate and so on. Obviously there are a lot of available models to fit, analyze and predict these types of data. For instance, basic time series model arima(p,d,q), Garch model, and multivariate time series ... [Read more...]

My last post I talked about how I use the data.table package for aggregating and removing duplicate observations. Although I use the data.table package quite often, there are many times when I use plyr (and now the new dplyr) package, primarily becaus... [Read more...]

It is common to use a Ljung-Box test to check that the residuals from a time series model resemble white noise. However, there is very little practical advice around about how to choose the number of lags for the test. The Ljung-Box test was proposed by Ljung and Box (Biometrika, 1978) ... [Read more...]

I enjoyed this story from the OpenHelix blog today, describing a Microsoft Research project to mine DNA sequences from web pages and map them to UCSC genome builds. Laura DeMare asks: what was the most-hit gene? Most hit gene? APOE? MT @GenomeBrowser We BLATed the Internet! DNA sequences from 40 billion ... [Read more...]

R rocks in both academia and industry nowadays. A rapidly increasing number of researchers choose R to be one of their productive tools for data analysis and data visualization. It is partially because the software is totally free and open-source but also because the community behind the stage who contributes ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Every once in a while a single book comes to crystallize a new discipline. If books still have this power in the era of electronic media, "Doing Data Science, Straight Talk from the Frontline" by Rachel Schutt and Cathy O’Neil: O'Reilly, 2013 might just be the book ... [Read more...]

The heart has its reasons which reason knows not (Blaise Pascal) You only need two functions to draw a heart mathematically. The upper part is generated by (1-(|x|-1)2)1/2 and the lower one by acos(1-|x|)-PI. Here is how this heart is: Whats the area of this ... [Read more...]

Over the past few months, I've had several people ask me about the tools I use to put papers together. For several year's I've maintained a page of resources somewhat grandiosely headed "Writing and Presenting Social Science". Really it just makes public my configuration files and templates for my text ... [Read more...]

Time was when I used to be a reasonably competent scholar, digging into the literature chasing down what folk actually said, and chasing forward to see whether claims had been refuted. Then I fell out of love with the academic literature – too many papers that said nothing, too many papers ... [Read more...]

Besides having coded a pretty cool MCMC app in Javascript, this guy Rasmus Bååth has started the Bayesian first aid project. The idea is that if there’s an R function called blabla.test performing test “blabla”, there should be a function bayes.blabla.test performing a similar test ... [Read more...]