We are currently selecting the cover design for OTexts books. The first one to go into print will be Forecasting: principles and practice. We have narrowed the choice to the two designs below, although changes are still possible. I thought it would be useful to get some feedback on these ... [Read more...]

I'd like to share code that uses spatial R and Google Earth for terrain analyses. In this example I took SRTM data at 1" resolution from http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/dem3.html#alps read it into R did a little processing and finally wrapped it up ... [Read more...]

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This time last year I published the first version of the 2011 Census Open Atlas which comprised Output Area Level census maps for each local authority district. This turned out to be quite a popular project, and I have also extended this to Japan. The methods used to construct the atlases ... [Read more...]

As I sit here waiting on more frigid temperatures subsequent to another 10 inches of snow, suffering from metastatic cabin fever, I can't help but ponder what I can do examine global warming/climate change.  Well, as luck would have it, R has the tools to explore this controversy.  Using two ... [Read more...]

Earo Wang recently interviewed me for the Chinese website Capital of Statistics. The English transcript of the intervew is on Earo’s personal website. This is the third interview I’ve done in the last 18 months. The others were for: Data Mining Research. Republished in Amstat News. DecisionStats.   [Read more...]

Student’s t-test is a staple of statistical analysis. A quick search on Google Scholar for “t-test” results in 170,000 hits in 2013 alone. In comparison, “Bayesian” gives 130,000 hits while “box plot” results in only 12,500 hits. To be honest, if I had to choose I would most of the time prefer a ... [Read more...]

This weekend brought a couple of firsts in Cardiff’s winner against Norwich After a wretched time at Manchester United, Wilfried Zaha recorded his first Premiership assist, whilst, more interestingly, Craig Bellamy became the first player in history to score for seven different Premier League clubs To celebrate, I thought ... [Read more...]

Version 1.3 of the RSiteCatalyst package to access the Adobe Analytics API is now available on CRAN! Changes include: Search via regex functionality in QueueRanked/QueueTrended functions Support for Realtime API reports: Overtime and one-element Ranked report Allow for variable API request timing in Queue functions Fixed validate flag in JSON ... [Read more...]

There are many occasions in my research when I want to create a within group index for a data frame. For example, with demographic data for siblings one might want to create a birth order index. The below illustrates a simple example of how one can create such an index ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert Revolution Analytics is announcing three new programs today that we hope will be modest but positive contributions to data science education and public service analytics. The first new program, the Academic Institution Program (AIP) enables colleges, universities and other educational institutions to obtain a site license for ... [Read more...]

Introduction This follows up on the previous posting, using data provided by Akima (1972). The four panels of the plot produced by the following code compare the original Akima spline formula with an improved version, and three styles of spline() fits. As noted in the code, two spline() methods are useless ... [Read more...]

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whether or not you hit the snooze button, once every month your morning radio station probably announces the latest employment statistics for the nation.  in the united states, those headlines come from the bureau of labor statistics' current popu... [Read more...]

In multiple regression analysis, multicollinearity is a common phenomenon, in which two or more predictor variables are highly correlated. If there is an exact linear relationship (perfect multicollinearity) among the independent variables, the rank of X is less than k+1(assume the number of predictor variables is k), and the ... [Read more...]

Living in NYC is not good for one’s cooking skills. There are just too many mouth-watering options out there that always convince me to eat out rather that stay in line for two hours at Trader Joe’s. Also, this means that my fridge always has room for life ... [Read more...]

Analyst firm RedMonk periodically publishes rankings of the Top 20 programming languages, as measured by activity on StackOverflow and number of repositories on GitHub. In their most recent ranking (January 2014), R is ranked #15 amongst all programming languages. An impressive ranking for a domain-specific language; the top 3 were the general-purpose languages Java, ... [Read more...]

There’s a hard-fought drive on Wikimedia commons to convert those images that should be in vector format (i.e. graphs, diagrams) from their current bitmap form. At the time of writing, the relevant category has over 7000 images in the category … Continue reading → [Read more...]

I received a message asking me why I use so often numbers like 1e6 (exponential form) instead of writing down the whole numbers. I never thought on this before. However, I can assure that it's not because I'm lazy and don't like typing long numbers. In fact, thinking on this ... [Read more...]

This article was first published on analyze stuff. It has been contributed to Anything but R-bitrary as the third article in its introductory series. By Ben Ogorek Introduction Alongside interstate highways, national defense, and social security, your tax dollars are used to collect data. Sometimes it’s high profile and ... [Read more...]