All statistical software have a learning curve, and compared to SPSS, R has taken me more time to learn the basics. However, since learning the basics, R seems easier to use than SPSS. Here are 10 tips and tricks (and some resources) I found helpful for getting started with R: Use ... [Read more...]

Tomorrow, for the final lecture of the Mathematical Statistics course, I will try to illustrate - using Monte Carlo simulations - the difference between classical statistics, and the Bayesien approach. The (simple) way I see it is the following, for frequentists, a probability is a measure of the the frequency ... [Read more...]

I did not intend for this little experiment to become a post, but I think the code builds nicely on the XML + rvest combination (also see yesterday’s post) for working with XML/HTML/SVG documents in R. It all started when I was playing on my iPhone i... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham’s post “rvest: easy web scraping with R” introduces the fine new package rvest very well.  For those now yearning a slightly more advanced example with a little help from pipeR + htmltools + XML, I thought this might fill your yea... [Read more...]

MilanoR staff is happy to announce the next MilanoR mee [...] [Read more...]

If you've lived in or simply love London, a wonderful new book for your coffee-table is London: The Information Capital. In 100 beautifully-rendered charts, the book explores the data that underlies the city and its residents. To create most of these charts, geographer James Cheshire and designer Oliver Uberti relied on ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

The National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine, and most well-known for hosting Pubmed, the go-to search engine for biomedical literature - every (Medline-indexed) publication goes up there. On a separate but related note, one thing I’m ... [Read more...]

I’ve written previously about some example R scripts I created to extract sea surface temperature data from NOAA’s Optimum Interpolated Sea Surface Temperature products. If you want daily global sea surface temperatures on a 0.25×0.25° grid, they gather those into 1-year files available at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/... [Read more...]

The gridGraphics package provides a function, grid.echo(), that can be used to convert a plot drawn with the graphics package to the same result drawn using grid. This provides access to a variety of grid tools for making customisations and … Continue reading → [Read more...]

[Read more...]

A few weeks back, after seeing my replication, one of the original authors of the Flexible Asset Allocation paper got … Continue reading → [Read more...]

by Tim Winke PhD student in Demography and Social Sciences in Berlin This post has been abstracted from Tim's entry to a contest that Dalia Research is running based on a global smarthpone survey that they are conducting. Tim's entry post is available as is all of the code behind ... [Read more...]

Earlier today I saw the hundred bazillionth question about how to use the paste function. My initial response was “take a look at example(paste) to see how it works”. Then I looked at example(paste), and it turns out that it’s not very good at all. There isn’... [Read more...]

This morning, Rcpp reached another round milestone: 300 packages on CRAN now depend on it (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo declarations). The graph is on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage over time. There are 41 more on BioCond... [Read more...]

Recently, Barr et al published a paper in the Journal of Memory and Language, arguing that we should fit maximal linear mixed models, i.e., fit models that have a full variance-covariance matrix specification for subject and for items. I suggest here t... [Read more...]

It is getting colder in London, yet it is still quite mild considering that it is late November. Well, indoors it still feels like 20°C (68°F) to me, but I have been told last week that I should switch on the heating. Luckily I found an old thermometer to check. ... [Read more...]

as the oldest panel survey out there, the bureau of labor statistics' national longitudinal surveys (nls) have been operating so long that justin bieber's grandparents might be too young (and also too legally canadian) to have participated in the initi... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

What the world needs right now is yet another tutorial on R packages and their creation. Luckily, this last Friday and Saturday, I had the opportunity to present in a workshop organized by Frank DiTraglia at Penn's shiny new Warren Center, and held a... [Read more...]