In an earlier post, I used mclapply to kick off parallel R processes and to demonstrate inter-process synchronization via the flock package. Although I have been using this approach to parallelism for a few years now, I admit, it has certain important disadvantages. It works only on a single machine, ... [Read more...]

A new version of rfoaas is now on CRAN. The rfoaas package provides an interface for R to the most excellent FOAAS service -- which provides a modern, scalable and RESTful web service for the frequent need to tell someone to eff off. The FOAAS backen... [Read more...]

Ecologists increasingly use mixed effects models, where some intercepts or slopes are fixed, and others are random (or varying). Often, confusion exists around whether and when to use fixed vs. random intercepts/slopes, which is understandable given their multiple definitions. In an attempt to help clarify the utility of varying ... [Read more...]

Each year after the group stage, there is the much awaited drawing of the eighth-final, which essentially defines a team’s fate. So far the thing is not too complicated, as there are 16 teams out of which we need to generate 8 games – no problem if it would be possible to ... [Read more...]

Release early and often. http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/ggRandomForests/index.html I may have been aggressive numbering the first CRAN release at v1.0, but there’s no going back now. The design of the feature set is complete even if the code has some catching up to… Continue ... [Read more...]

Plotly is a  web-based platform for making graphs and analyzing data. Plotly’s APIs and web app... [Read more...]

Harry Long posted another article on SeekingAlpha. As usual, it’s another “looks amazing at first glance, and winds up being … Continue reading → [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The American Statistical Association (ASA) Undergraduate Guidelines Workgroup recently published the report Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Statistical Science. Although intended for educators setting up or revamping Stats programs at colleges and universities, this concise, 17 page document should be good reading for anyone who wants to ... [Read more...]

Recently the NPR program Marketplace did a story about the rise of the use of dropout early warning systems in public schools that you can read or listen to online. I was lucky enough to be interviewed for the piece because of the role I have play... [Read more...]

A new release 0.4.2 of RProtoBuf is now on CRAN. RProtoBuf provides R bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("Protobuf") data encoding library used and released by Google, and deployed as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol by numerous projects. Murray and Jeroen did almost all of the heavy lifting. Many ... [Read more...]

“So let’s start with the fact that the study had only 100 people, which isn’t nearly enough to be able to make any determinations like this. That’s very small power. Secondly, it was already split into two groups, and the two groups by the way have absolutely zero ... [Read more...]

In this post I introduce R code to simulate tsetse fly populations I’m developing for the Liverpool School for Tropical Medicine starting in 2014. I will outline some background and point you to the code and user interface that are under development. In subsequent posts I’ll cover particular aspects ... [Read more...]

This series of posts introduced various methods of exploratory data analysis, providing theoretical backgrounds and practical examples.  Fully commented and readily usable R scripts are available for all topics for you to copy and paste for your own analysis!  Most of these posts involve data visualization and plotting, and I ... [Read more...]

In my previous post I said that my students are using data from NOAA for their research.NOAA in fact provides daily averages of several environmental parameters for thousands of weather stations scattered across the globe, completely free. In details, NOAA provides the following data: Mean temperature for the day ... [Read more...]

We've just made the latest update to Revolution R Open, the enhanced distribution of open-source R, available for download from MRAN. The main feature of this release is an upgrade to the R 3.1.2 engine, and support for MacOS Yosemite. (You can read about all the changes in the NEWS file.) ... [Read more...]

I had not really stopped to think of this until I listened to this The Web Ahead podcast with Sara Soueidan.  What is really interesting about the tech world is how experts can seemingly pop up out of nowhere and become the authority on a topic.  In the podcast, this ... [Read more...]

In case you missed them, here are some articles from November of particular interest to R users. Reviews of some of the R-related presentations (by John Chambers, Trevor Hastie and others) at the H20 World conference. An R/Shiny app for making egg-nog. An author's look at how R was ... [Read more...]

I was recently presenting on the use of statistics for risk analysis at the SIRACon conference held in Minneapolos (Oct. 9th and 10th, 2014). I was explaining how models and algorithms work at a high level: given one or more observations and the outcomes, we build models or algorithms to learn ... [Read more...]

[This article was first published on Rmetrics blogs, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here) Want to share your [Read more...]

In the operational loss calculation, it is important to use CPI (Consumer Price Index) adjusting historical losses. Below is an example showing how to download CPI data online directly from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and then to calculate monthly and quarterly CPI adjustment factors with Python. [Read more...]