When getting started in machine learning, it's often helpful to see a worked example of a real-world problem from start to finish. But it can be hard to find an example with the "right" level of complexity for a novice. Here's what I look for: uses r... [Read more...]

After a recent system upgrade (to Linux Mint LMDE), I was no longer able to run RStudio through the remote desktop application X2Go. It turns out that this is due to a problem with the Qt libraries (see this website). As suggested here, I just deleted... [Read more...]

I was recently hunting for a function that will strip the extension from a file – changing foo.png to foo, and so forth. I was knitting a report, and wanted to replace the file extension of the input with the extension of the the output file. (knitr handles this automatically ... [Read more...]

The Organizing Committee of userR!2014 at UCLA, to be held June 30th through July 3rd, is pleased to announce the opening of registration on its website:  [Read more...]

At work I use ggplot2 almost for everything. I really like the mid term between high level (highcharts) and low-level (like d3 for example). The deafult theme for ggplot it's good, and really good if you compare with the old looking R base graphics, and there is more: the ggthemes ... [Read more...]

R easily has more than two million users around the world, but where is R activity the most concentrated? That's the question that the team of R users at Rapporter seeks to answer, by combining data about locations of R Foundation members, package authors, package downloaders, and user group members ... [Read more...]

Now that we have reached the milestone of 30,000 (!) enthusiastic R students, and the DataCamp platform is paving its way into academics and professional organizations, we felt it was time to take our design to a higher level. So as of this week, your favourite free learning platform for R tutorials ... [Read more...]

The recent story about a skydiver nearly being hit by falling meteor got me thinking about all the pieces of rock floating around in near-Earth space. Despite the fact that the supposed meteor was probably just a chunk of rock mistakenly packed in with a parachute, the fact that something ... [Read more...]

There are multiple desktop tools (Bioedit, Emboss, various basic bioinformatic tools) and browser based tools (NEBcutter, biotools, In silico restriction digestion and various other tools) available for performing restriction digestion of smaller proka... [Read more...]

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I’m one of many who bemoan the fact that statistics is typically thought of as — alas, even taught as — a set of formula plugging methods. One enters one’s data, turns the key, and the proper answers pop out. This of course is not the case at all, and ... [Read more...]

If you love knitr and rstudio and use them to produce long reports, you probably know that you can produce a table of contents in your html (and pdf) documents. In the newer rstudio (Version 0.98.801 or later) you do it by requesting a toc in the doc header, something like ... [Read more...]

Calendar Strategy is a very simple strategy that buys an sells at the predetermined days, known in advance. Today I want to show how we can easily investigate performance at and around Month End days. First let’s load historical prices for SPY from Yahoo Fiance and compute SPY perfromance ... [Read more...]

Recently, Greg Laughlin, the founder of a new statistical software called Statwing, let me try his product for free. I happen to like free things very much (the college student is strong within me) so I gave it a try. I mostly like how easy it is to use: For ... [Read more...]

In this fourth post on Measles data I want to have a look at correlation between states. As described before, the data is from Project Tycho, which contains data from all weekly notifiable disease reports for the United States dating back to 1888... [Read more...]

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It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small (Neil Armstrong) Where would you come out ... [Read more...]

If you're having trouble teaching statistics using R, then you'll just love the statsTeachR collaboration. It's being launched officially at the 2014 New England Statistics Symposium today. Here's what it's about: "statsTeachR is an open-access, online repository of modular lesson plans, a.k.a. "modules", for teaching statistics using R at ... [Read more...]

YES R!Looking at rapporter's recent blog post on "R activity Around the World", I am shocked by how few users actually monetarily support the R Foundation.  Looking at the US for instance there are only 27 donars representing a little more than 0.... [Read more...]

Here are the slides of the tutorial on ABC methods I gave yesterday at both AISTAST 2014 and MLSS. (I actually gave a tutorial at another MLSS a few years ago, on the pretty island of Berder in Brittany, next to Vannes.) They are definitely similar to previous talks and tutorials ... [Read more...]