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As a computer scientist, RStudio's Joe Cheng has some great insights into the R language and how it compares with other programming language. In the interview with DataScience.LA below, he notes that while R is often thought about as a domain-specific language (or DSL), the combination of a functional ... [Read more...]

I’ve released a new version, pqR-2014-09-30, of my speedier, “pretty quick”, implementation of R, with some major performance improvements, and some features from recent R Core versions. It also has fixes for bugs (some also in R-3.1.1) and installation glitches. Details are in pqR NEWS. Here I’... [Read more...]

This is the bimonthly R Jobs post (for 2014-10-06), based on the R-bloggers’ sister website: R-users.com. If you are an employer who is looking to hire people from the [Read more...]

SupStat is offering a 5-day intensive course in machine learning techniques in R starting this Sunday, October 5th at its Times Square office. Classes are held on October 5th, 12th, and 18th, and November 2nd and 9th, from 10 am to 5 pm for total 35 hours of classroom time and 3 weeks of ... [Read more...]

Joe Cheng is a software engineer. Unfortunately the term gets thrown around pretty lightly, so... [Read more...]

tl;dr We are able to build 14,000 packages across 6 zones in 4.5 hours At Joyent we have long had a focus on high performance, whether it's through innovations in SmartOS, carefully selecting our hardware, or providing customers with tools such as DTrace to identify bottlenecks in their application… [Read more...]

Tweet This year election renders an even more fragmented legislative. The way political scientists measure this is by applying an algorithm to calculate the Effective Number of Parties, which is a measure that helps to go beyond the simple number of parties. A widely accepted algorithm was proposed by M. ... [Read more...]

This is part two of a three-part blog series on building a DGA classifier and it is split into the three phases of building a classifier: 1) Data preparation 2) Feature engineering and 3) Model selection (this post) Back in part 1, we prepared the data and we are starting with a nice clean ... [Read more...]

I’ve received a few emails about including regression variables (i.e., covariates) in TBATS models. As TBATS models are related to ETS models, tbats() is unlikely to ever include covariates as explained here. It won’t actually complain if you include an xreg argument, but it will ignore it. ... [Read more...]

Monte Carlo simulation and resampling methods for social science is a short paperback written by Thomas Carsey and Jeffrey Harden on the use of Monte Carlo simulation to evaluate the adequacy of a model and the impact of assumptions behind this model. I picked it in the library the other ... [Read more...]

My friend and colleague Andreas sent me a link to a working paper published by a statistician at the University of Christchurch (New Zealand) and discussed here. The main idea of the paper was to use a Bayesian model to predict the number of futur... [Read more...]

This is my second post in converting SAS's PROC MCMC examples in R. The task in his week is determining the transformation parameter in a Box-Cox transformation. SAS only determines Lambda, but I am not so sure about that. What I used to do was get an ... [Read more...]

Similar to the row search, by-group aggregation is another perfect use case to demonstrate the power of split-and-conquer with parallelism. In the example below, it is shown that the homebrew by-group aggregation with foreach pakage, albeit inefficiently coded, is still a lot faster than the summarize() function in Hmisc package. [Read more...]

What is a Prediction Problem?A business problem which involves predicting future events by extracting patterns in the historical data. Prediction problems are solved using Statistical techniques, mathematical models or machine learning techniques.For example: Forecasting stock price for the next week, predicting which football team wins the world cup, ... [Read more...]

Last week, @dmonniaux published an interesting post entitled l’erreur n’a rien d’original  on  his blog. He was asking the following question : let , and denote three real-valued coefficients, under which assumption on those three coefficients does has a real-valued root ? Everyone aswered , but no one mentioned that it ... [Read more...]

When I am am working in Sql Server and need to send an email I use "sp_send_dbmail". So when I am working in R, I didn't know how to send an email. I often use this as notification that a … Continue reading → [Read more...]

by Andrie deVries One of the reasons that R is so popular is the CRAN archive of useful packages. However, with more than 5,900 packages on CRAN, many organisations need to maintain a private mirror of CRAN with only a subset of packages that are relevant to them. The package miniCRAN ... [Read more...]

Anders Ekholm has written a wonderful paper Ekholm, Anders G. Components of Portfolio Variance: Systematic, Selection and Timing August 8, 2014 http://ssrn.com/abstract=2463649 demonstrating how we might decompose a money manager’s performance with... [Read more...]

A month ago when the WHO was projecting estimates of the effect of current outbreak of Ebola being as deadly as affecting 20,000 people, I ran some elementary modelling and found that these estimates are far too small given the current trend.  The... [Read more...]