Until now I've always used randomly generated graphs which was completely fine but I've always wanted to use a real graph at some point. And since I'm gonna be sitting in a train for a couple of hours and have a thing for social graphs, I thought it'd ... [Read more...]

I started reading Applied Computational Economics & Finance by Mario J. Miranda and Paul L. Fackler. It is a very interesting book that I recommend to every one of my colleagues. The only issue I have with this book, is that the programming language they use is Matlab, which is proprietary. ... [Read more...]

Fangraphs recently published an interesting dataset that measures defensive efficiency of fielders. For each player, the Inside Edge dataset breaks their opportunities to make plays into five categories, ranging from almost impossible to routine. It al... [Read more...]

Norm Matloff points us to a pithy example that sums up Simpson's Paradox perfectly, captured in the title of a medical paper: "Good for Women, Good for Men, Bad for People". He explains how Simpson's Paradox isn't a paradox at all, but just the consequence of including a minor variable ... [Read more...]

This is the bimonthly R Jobs post (for 2014-04-22), based on the R-bloggers’ sister website: R-users.com. If you are an employer who is looking to hire people from [Read more...]

A new update of my sjPlot package was just released on CRAN. This release focused on improving existing functions and bug fixes again. Especially the table output functions (see my previous blog posts on table output functions here and here) improved a lot. Tables now have more and better possibilities ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

I have added a demo file to the latest version of the fanplot package. It has lots of examples of different plotting styles to represent uncertainty in time series data. In the updated package I have added functionality to plot … Continue reading → [Read more...]

One of the goals of the rOpenSci is to facilitate interoperability between different data sources around web with our tools. We can achieve this by providing functionality within our packages that converts data coming down via web api's in one format (often a provider specific schema) into a standard format. ... [Read more...]

Have you ever thought of borrowing some money? A common case is when you have to borrow money for buying a house, which is called a mortgage. Wikipedia ('Mortgage loan' entry) goes into much more detail about the definition than what I'll cover. One o... [Read more...]

Last week I published an R script to interface with Gitbook. I received some positive feedback and decided to include all the code in an R package. This also allowed me to make some nice additions including default support for MathJax. It is currently available on Github and can be ... [Read more...]

Last Thursday I had the pleasure to attend the Tokyo R user group meeting. And what a fun meeting it was! Over 40 R users had come together in central Tokyo. Yohei Sato, who organises the meetings, allowed me to talk a little about the recent developme... [Read more...]

The latest issue of the American Statistician has a set of thought-provoking point/counterpoint papers on Simpson’s Paradox, with a tie-in to the controversial issue of causality. (I will not address the causality issue here.) Since I have long had my own thoughts about Simpson’s, I’ll postpone ... [Read more...]

There are several other blogs on forecasting that readers might be interested in. Here are seven worth following: No Hesitations by Francis Diebold (Professor of Economics, University of Pennsylvania). Diebold needs no introduction to forecasters. He primarily covers forecasting in economics and finance, but also xkcd cartoons, graphics, research issues, ... [Read more...]

Image by Justin Reznick   “An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.” Laurence J. Peter (author and creator of the Peter Principle) If you were paying attention to financial sites last month, you probably noticed a number of articles on “... [Read more...]

Fama and French changed the financial world with their factors in 1993.  Another duo Andrea Frazzini and Lasse Heje Pedersen have expanded our world with their Betting Against Beta (BAB) and Quality Minus Junk (QMJ)  factors.  The combined factor se... [Read more...]

Okay okay.  The joke is up.  Besides likely necessitating an emergency call to from the Stata Management Team to the Stata Legal Team, my post on April 1st of 2014 entitled "RStata: Stata Fully Mapped into R", was intended as a practical joke... [Read more...]

Starting last summer I worked on a short project that set out to estimate the potential costs of externalities due to unconventional shale gas production in the Marcellus shale on local house prices using a dataset of roughly 150,000 recently sold houses in Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. I stopped working ... [Read more...]

If you missed last week's webinar presented by Revolution Analytics' US Chief Scientist Mario Inchiosa, Decision Trees built in Hadoop plus more Big Data Analytics with Revolution R Enterprise, the slides and webinar replay are now available for download. The webinar includes a demo of building decision trees and regression ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]