I had the great pleasure of speaking to the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Simon Fraser University on last Friday to share my career advice with its students and professors.  I emphasized the importance of learning skills in data manipulation during my presentation, and I want to supplement ... [Read more...]

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We are glad to announce the launch of DataScience.Vegas as a blog that aggregates all the events, news and information impacting the Las Vegas data science community. Our community has witnessed the birth and steady growth of several data science meetup groups with a very enthusiastic group of devoted ... [Read more...]

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Hadoop is being widely used for processing big data and Neo4j is a popular open-source graph database. When doing social network analysis on big data, a “natural” thought is to use them together. Unfortunately, Neo4j cannot work directly on HDFS … Continue reading → [Read more...]

Introduction The drat package was released earlier this month, and described in a first blog post. I received some helpful feedback about what works and what doesn't. For example, Jenny Bryan pointed out that I was not making a clear enough distinction between the role of using drat to publish ... [Read more...]

In the context of -means, we want to partition the space of our observations into  classes. each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean. Here “nearest” is in the sense of some norm, usually the (Euclidean) norm. Consider the case where we have 2 classes. The means being respectively ... [Read more...]

In Bayesian Approaches to Clinical Trials and Health-Care Evaluation (David J. Spiegelhalter, Keith R. Abrams, Jonathan P. Myles) they mention that an non informative prior should be uniform over the range of interest. They combine this with the d... [Read more...]

Most Popular Hubway Stations (in order): Post Office Sq. – located in the heart of the financial district. Charles St. & Cambridge – the first Hubway stop after crossing from Cambridge over Longfellow Bridge. Tremont St & West – East side of the Boston Common South Station Cross St. & Hannover – entrance to North End combing ... [Read more...]

Sometimes it is useful to export the output of a long-running R command. For example, you might want to run a time consuming regression just before leaving work on Friday night, but would like to get the output saved inside your Dropbox folder to take a look at the results ... [Read more...]

What is git? Git is a version control system, and the best I have worked with for that matter. 15 years ago, I was happy when my company decided to migrate from RCS to SVN. Branching became simple, and many daily problems just disappeared. So I shuned other source control versioning ... [Read more...]

Over the last few days I put together a new package RcppAPT which interfaces the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, ... commands and their GUI-based brethren. The package currently implements two functions which permit search for package information via a regular expression, as well as a (vectorised) package ... [Read more...]

For a project I’m working on, I needed to access residential electricity rates and associated coordinate information (lat/long) for locations in the US. After a little searching, I found that data.gov offers the rate information in two forms: a static list of approximate rates by region and ... [Read more...]

Ever wanted to include a plain-LaTeX vignette in your package and have it compiled into a PDF? The R.rsp package provides a four-line solution for this. But, first, what's R.rsp? R.rsp is an R package that implements a compiler for the RSP markup language. RSP can be ... [Read more...]

Today, Ryan Peek and Michele Tobias gave an introduction to making maps in R. Here’s the webcast: (Pardon the little scuffle at the beginning and as we switched computers halfway through. Still getting the hang of hangouts.) Resources: Download all of Ryan’s code and HTML files here. See ... [Read more...]

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In Part 1 I have introduced the weather data set we will be using in this series of tutorials. We are now going to have the data prepared for the subsequent EDA. We will recode and transform variables, change their types, and perform some basic data ch... [Read more...]

Wouldn't it be cool for US readers to see how big foreign countries are by comparing them to presumably familiar US states? Wouldn't it be cool for non-US readers to see how big US states are by comparing them to presumably familiar countries? The post Put the size of countries ... [Read more...]