While I had not had kamikaze pigeons hitting my windows for quite a while…, it may be that one of them decided to move to biological warfare: when I came back from Edinburgh, my office at the University was in a terrible state as a bird had entered through a ... [Read more...]

I’ve been using RStudio’s new ability to run Python scripts since I often need to analyze/process data in R but then run web services with said data in Python (usually via Flask). I’d rather live with the foibles of the RStudio editor than use a separate ... [Read more...]

A recent FastCoLabs article, "The 9 Best Languages For Crunching Data", starts its list with the R language: It would be downright negligent to start this list with any language other than R. It has been kicking around since 1997 as a free alternative to pricey statistical software, such as Matlab or ... [Read more...]

As of today, you can search via Rdocumentation not only CRAN packages, but also the R packages available on GitHub and Bioconductor.  This is our largest update yet, and brings us one step closer to creating  a central place for all R documentation related info and questions. Today, the rise ... [Read more...]

When testing an hypothesis with a categorical explanatory variable and a quantitative response variable, the tool normally used in statistics is Analysis of Variances, also called ANOVA.In this post I am performing an ANOVA test using the R programming language, to a dataset of breast cancer new cases across ... [Read more...]

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nIntroductionnI work in consulting. If you're a consultant at a certain type of company, agency, organization, consultancy, whatever, this can sometimes mean travelling a lot.nnMany business travellers 'in the know' have heard the old joke that if you want to stay at any type of hotel anywhere in the ... [Read more...]

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Dear Blog Readers,I have numerous topics I could discuss in future blog posts.  However, I would like to capture those topics that most interest you.  Therefore, I've put together a short survey (see the link below) for everyone to weigh-in o... [Read more...]

Following from the last post and setting aside the not-working-as-advertised Trend Vigor indicator, we will turn our attention to the … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Stone flakes are waste products from the tool making process in the stone age. This is the second post, first post was clustering, second linking to hominid type. The data also contains a more or less continuous age variable, which gives possibili... [Read more...]

I wanted to take a look at what works in low vol environments, such as we are currently experiencing. I am open to the idea we have entered a period of structurally low volatility due to increased regulatory burden and flow on effects from the dec... [Read more...]

Every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes (Christian Goldbach, 1742) The point cloud known as Goldbach’s Comet represents the amount of different ways (y axis) an even number (x axis) can be writen as sum of two prime numbers. In this plot, x ... [Read more...]

Introduction Definitions of Gulf Stream location sometimes centre on thermal signature, but it might make sense to work with dynamic height instead. This is illustrated here, using a model for , with the distance along the transect. The idea is to select , the halfway point in the function, where the slope ... [Read more...]

I have released a new version, pqR-2014-06-19, of my speedier, “pretty quick”, implementation of R.  This and the previous release (pqR-2014-02-23) are maintenance releases, with bug fixes, improved documentation, and better test procedures. The result is that pqR now works with a large collection of 3438 packages. ... [Read more...]

I have seen many discussions around Tableau Vs. R. Here are my thoughts on this topic. Tableau is a fantastic tool for pattern discovery using data visualization. It is usually my tool of choice when I want throw some data and keep playing with the data to see whether any ... [Read more...]

I started writing in Portuguese (á, é, í, ó, ú, ç, etc.) inside R for MAC, but I receive some encoding issues, so I managed to fix it at once by simply typing the following command in the terminal: defaults write org.R-project.R force.LANG en_US.UTF-8 [Read more...]

Something triggers our interest. Possibly it's an ad, a review or just word of mouth. We want to know more about the movie, the device, the software, or the service. Because we come with different preferences and needs, our searches vary in intensity. For some it is one and done, ... [Read more...]

7 days to go for submissions in the DataVis contest at useR!2014 (see contest webpage). Note that the contest is open for all R users, not only conference participants. Submit your solution soon! PISA dataset allows to challenge some ,,common opinions”, like are boys or girls better in math / reading. But, ... [Read more...]

The R online training site DataCamp has created an infographic comparing R, SAS and SPSS. Provocatively titled "Statistical Language Wars", the infographic compares the history, purpose, ease of learning, popularity and marketability of skills in each of the three systems. Here's a small detail (click for the full chart): The ... [Read more...]