NBA basketball is the one the sports I enjoy watching the most. As I was ordering my (undisclosed amount)th beer while watching a game during after-work hours, it occurred to me how often I had seen sparsely populated arenas during games, with large areas of seats going unoccupied. This ... [Read more...]

Have you ever been asked a question starting with: “Can you use R to…“, only to politely interrupt the inquisitor at this point to reply with something similar to “Yes, you can! R probably already has a package for this”. If this sounds familiar to you, you won’t be ... [Read more...]

Around 199 years ago the largest volcano in recorded history, Mount Tambora, erupted, spewing an enormous volume of molten rock and ash into the atmosphere and onto the surrounding land. How is the intensity of a volcanic eruption quantified? Most people know about the Richter Scale which quantifies the energy released ... [Read more...]

CESifo Group in Munich is publishing a couple of very good articles covering the EU Region.In a most recent research I'm trying to use the monthly Business Climate Index from ifo as a layer to trigger further trading activities in R.Here are further De... [Read more...]

I recently did a workshop about data with PhD students. That was great to order my thoughts and put together a lot of good resources. All material used (with lots of links) is available in GitHub: https://github.com/ibartomeus/Data. Topics range from hardcore … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Introduction A while ago, one of my co-workers asked me to group box plots by plotting them side-by-side within each group, and he wanted to use patterns rather than colours to distinguish between the box plots within a group; the publication that will display his plots prints in black-and-white only.  ... [Read more...]

R 3.1.0 came out today. Among the (impressive and long as usual) list of changes is the added ability to specify CXX_STD = CXX11 in order to get C++11 (or the best available subset on older compilers). This brings a number of changes and opportunitie... [Read more...]

As announced this morning on mailing list, R 3.1.0 (codenamed "Spring Dance") has been released. The source code is available now; as of this writing binary versions haven't yet appeared on CRAN or propagated to the mirrors, but I expect they'll be available in a day or two. You can check ... [Read more...]

R 3.1.0 (codename “Spring Dance“) was released today! You can get the source code from http://cran.r-project.org/src/base/R-3/R-3.1.0.tar.gz or wait for it to be mirrored at a CRAN site nearer to you. Binaries for various platforms will appear in due course. The full list ... [Read more...]

If you've ever started a book and not finished it, it may comfort you to know that you are not alone. It's hard to get accurate estimates of the percentage books that are discontinued, but the rise of e-reading (and resulting circumvention of privacy) affords us the opportunity to answer ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The seven lightning talks presented to the Bay Area useR Group on Tuesday night were not only really interesting (in some cases downright entertaining) in their own right, but they also illustrated the diversity of R applications, and the extent to which R has become embedded in ... [Read more...]

A funny thing about social media in the 21st century is that it allows us to connect with a lot of people.. by a lot, I mean so many that it's easy to lose track of any sense of scale. Maybe others are better at this, but I have a ... [Read more...]

Every now and then you might want to make a nice table to include directly in your documents without having to faff about with columns later in excel or word. Typical issues might be the specification of decimal places, converting a value and proportion/SE column into one to take ... [Read more...]

There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres (Pythagoras) Spring is here and I will be on holiday next week. I cannot be more happy! It is time to celebrate so I have drawn another fractal. It is called the ... [Read more...]

In experimental evolution research, few things are more important than growth. Both the rate of growth and the resulting yield can provide direct insights into a strain or species’ fitness. Whether one strain with a trait of interest can outgrow (and outcompete) another that possesses a variation of that trait … [Read more...]

Ari Lamstein has updated his choroplethr package with a new capability for creating animated data maps. I can't embed the animated version here, but click the image below to see an animation of US counties by average household income, from the richest to the poorest by percentile. (The code behind ... [Read more...]

categoryCompare Paper Finally Out! I can finally say that the publication on my Bioconductor package categoryCompare is finally published in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology section of Frontiers in Genetics. This has been a long time coming, and I wanted to give some background on the inspiration and development of ... [Read more...]

Image by Timothy Poulton   A long-standing paradigm among savers and investors is to favor a mixture of 40% bonds and 60% equities. The simple rationale is that stocks will provide greater returns while bonds will serve as a diversifier when if equities fall. If you are saving for your pension, you probably ... [Read more...]

Heres a couple of functions for calculating the confidence intervals for proportions. Firstly I give you the Simple Asymtotic Method: simpasym [Read more...]

Recently I encountered an R package called pingr, made by Rasmus Bååth (the same guy who did MCMC in a web page, my visualization of 2013). You install it, you type ping(), and it goes ping. Nice. In fact there … Continue reading → [Read more...]