Introduction Soon after map projections were added to Oce, bug reports showed that coastline plots in some projections were subject to anomalous lines that run horizontally on the plot. A ad-hoc scheme was code to try to prevent this, but it does not always work. Problems are compounded for filled ... [Read more...]

Ramnath Vaidyanathan just released his new R interactive package, rMaps (Vaidyanathan, 2014). The packages relies on the development version of his widely known rCharts package (Vaidyanathan, 2013) as well as javascript libraries that specialize in maps. If you don't know Ramnath, he is one of the most active R developers out there!! ... [Read more...]

Our team has been cranking out a large number of tools over the past several months. As regular readers are aware, our software packages provide programmatic access to a diverse and extensive trove of scientific data. More recently we’ve expanded our efforts to build more general purpose and cross-domain ... [Read more...]

Jay Jacobs (@jayjacobs)—my co-author of the soon-to-be-released book Data-Driven Security—& I have been hard at work over at the book’s sister-blog cranking out code to help security domain experts delve into the dark art of data science. We’ve covered quite a bit of ground since January 1st, ... [Read more...]

For those who are addicted to R and haven’t the time to click the mouse on a web browser you too can still be informed about the results of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. I was inspired by a SO … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Have you ever wondered whether the first semester of a PhD is really all that busy? My complete lack of posts last fall should prove it Some thoughts on the Fall term, now that Spring is well under way: The … Continue reading → [Read more...]

It's good to see that more and more students of econometrics are taking an interest in "Data Analytics" / "Big Data" /"Data Science" literature. As I've commented previously, there's a lot that we can all learn from each other. Moreover, many of "boundaries" are very soft, and are more perceived than ... [Read more...]

A data analysis surprise party. Simple question If I have correlation matrices each estimated with a month of daily returns, how much worse is the average of six of those compared to the estimate with six months of daily data? Expected answer Do a statistical bootstrap with the returns and ... [Read more...]

The BayesFactor packageThis blog is a companion to the BayesFactor package in R (website), which supports inference by Bayes factors in common research designs. Bayes factors have been proposed as more principled replacements for common classical statistical procedures such as \(p\) values; this blog will offer tutorials in using the ... [Read more...]

Apart from going longer than I had anticipated, very little of any significance went wrong during my R session at UofT on friday!  It took a while at the beginning for everyone to get set up.  Everyone was connecting to … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Introduction The default swN2() calculation in Oce uses a smoothing spline. One disadvantage of this is that few readers will know how it works. A possible alternative is to compute d(rho)/dz using the slope inferred from a running-window linear regression. Such a slope is provided by the new ... [Read more...]

Last week I made the core of a Bayesian model for sensory profiling data. This week the extras need to be added. That is, there are a bunch of extra interactions and the error is dependent on panelists and descriptors.Note that where last week I pointe... [Read more...]

At the CLRS last year, Glenn Meyers talked about something very near to my heart: a skewed normal distribution. In loss reserving (and I'm sure, many other contexts) standard linear regression is less than ideal as it presumes that deviations from the mean are equally distributed. We rarely expect this ... [Read more...]

Similar to R and Pandas in Python, Julia provides a simple yet efficient interface with SQLite database. In addition, it is extremely handy to use sqldf() function, which is almost identical to the sqldf package in R, in SQLite package for data munging. [Read more...]

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The R statistical software is provided either as source code or pre-compiled binary files. In the majority of cases the binaries are sufficient but there may be situations where it is necessary to compile the software from source code and this post describes the steps required on an Ubuntu Linux ... [Read more...]

Package Version Increment Pre- and Post-commit Hooks If you just want the hook scripts, check this gist. If you want to know some of the motivation behind writing them, and about the internals, then read on. Package Version Incrementing A good practice to get into is incrementing the minor version ... [Read more...]

Introduction The polar graph known as a hodograph can be useful for vector plots, and also for showing varition within nearly-cyclical time series data. The Oce R package should have a function to create hodographs, but as usual my first step is to start by writing isolated code, testing to ... [Read more...]

I occasionally get email asking how to detect whether seasonality is present in a data set. Sometimes the period of the potential seasonality is known, but in other cases it is not. I’ve discussed before how to estimate an unknown seasonal period, and how to measure the strength of ... [Read more...]

I am currently working on a paper on Academic Blogging, from my own experience. And I wanted to do something similar to Stephen Wolfram’s personal analytics of my life. More specifically, I wanted to understand when I do post my blog entries. If I post more entries during office ... [Read more...]