With this year’s Comrades Marathon just less than a month away, I was reminded of a story from earlier in the year. Mark Dowdeswell, a statistician at Wits University, found evidence of cheating by some middle and back of the pack Comrades runners. He identified a group of 20 athletes ... [Read more...]

At the end of March Google released a new version of the Chart Tools API with new options for point shapes and line brushes. The arguments are called pointShape and lineDashStyle and can be set directly via googleVis. We published googleVis 0.5.2 on CR... [Read more...]

almost a century older than its own capital city, the decennial censo demografico no brasil (censo) forms the basis of every major survey product in the country.  the pesquisa nacional por amostra de domicilios (pnad), the pesquisa de orcamentos f... [Read more...]

A new release 4.300 of Armadillo, the templated C++ library for linear algebra, was released by Conrad a few days ago. As usual, this was rolled up in a new RcppArmadillo release 0.4.300.0 which is now on CRAN and in Debian. This release brings ni... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

A short update: in the past month, R-users.com has received between 200 to 400 views a day, and 1,000 to 2,000 views after the bimonthly R Jobs post is published on [Read more...]

This is a flashback post, I was working on species distribution shifts over the last 40 years last summer and recently Rémi Genevest contacted me asking me how I managed to import the CRU TS 1.2 dataset into R. As always a more readable version of the code can be found ... [Read more...]

For more than 7 years, Revolution Analytics has provided expert technical support to users of the R language, as part of their annual subscription to Revolution R Enterprise (RRE). Now, all users of open source R can get the same expert technical support with our new AdviseR program, for just $795 per ... [Read more...]

7 R Quirks That Will Drive You Nutty StumpedEvery language has its idiosyncrasies. Some “designer”“ type languages have less due to extreme thoughtfulness of language engineers. I suspect Julia for example has many less quirks. However, despite its quirkiness R has become an amazingly flexible resource for a diverse range of ... [Read more...]

“Overrated” and “underrated” are slippery terms to try to quantify. An interesting way of looking at this, I thought, would be to compare the reviews of film critics with those of Joe Public, reasoning that a film which is roundly-lauded by … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Introduction Reason #3: RStudio’s shiny Examples “Slow” Simulation Understanding Model Assumptions Types of Error Illustrating Fine Points Playing Games Shiny vs. manipulate Instructional Apps Gallery? Introduction This is the third in a projected five-part series of posts aimed at colleagues who teach elementary statistics. If you teach with R but ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

We have an exciting new initiative at Monash University with some new positions in business analytics. This is part of a plan to strengthen our research and teaching in the data science/computational statistics area. We are hoping to make multiple appointments, at junior and senior levels. These are five-year ... [Read more...]

[This article was first published on Adventures in Analytics and Visualization, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page [Read more...]

Pretty soon we will be having European Elections. I cannot tell when exactly, that depends on country. Over here the elections get a some attention, which is how I ran into data from votewatch.eu on voting of MEPs. That was just too interesting, so I made some plots.Data ... [Read more...]

This past week I attended the National Water Quality Monitoring Conference in Cincinnati. Aside from spending my time attending talks, workshops, and meeting like-minded individuals, I spent an unhealthy amount of time in the hotel bar working on this blog post. My past experiences mixing coding and beer have suggested ... [Read more...]

This is a function I wrote up for reversing KML-paths. The paths within a KML can partially matched by their name-tags## name: ReverseKmlPath ## use: Reverser a KML-path by matching its ## arguments: PATH_TO_DOC the path to the KML-file## NAME the value of the name tag, function uses partial matching!## ... [Read more...]

A/B tests are one of the simplest reliable experimental designs. Controlled experiments embody the best scientific design for establishing a causal relationship between changes and their influence on user-observable behavior. “Practical guide to controlled experiments on the web: listen to your customers not to the HIPPO” Ron Kohavi, Randal ... [Read more...]

I'm posting a recent project's spin-off, which is a custom line-generalizer which I used for huge KML-paths. Anyone with a less clumpsy approach?## line generalizing function: takes two vectors of with x/ycoords ## and return ids of x/y elements which distance to its next element## is shorter than the ... [Read more...]