Executive summary Surprisingly good. And it’s not like my expectations were especially low. Structure There are 20 chapters.  I mostly like the chapters and their order. Hadley breaks the 20 chapters into 4 parts.  He’s wrong.  Figure 1 illustrates the correct way to formulate parts. Figure 1: Chapters and Parts of Advanced R.    ... [Read more...]

In this note am going to recount “my favorite R bug.” It isn’t a bug in R. It is a bug in some code I wrote in R. I call it my favorite bug, as it is easy to commit and (thanks to R’s overly helpful nature) takes ... [Read more...]

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I haven’t posted for a while, so here are some news items: My new book, Parallel Computation for Data Science, will be out in June or July. I believe it will be useful to anyone doing computationally intensive work. After a few months being busy with the book and ... [Read more...]

Consider planning a clinicial trial where patients are randomized in permuted blocks of size four to either a 'control' or 'treatment' group. The outcome is measured on an 11-point ordinal scale (e.g., the numerical rating scale for pain). It may be reasonable to evaluate the results of this trial ... [Read more...]

Just because I’m ignorant doesn’t mean I won’t try things.  Feel free to correct any ignorance that follows.  More than anything I would like to feature the new htmlwidget visNetwork.  I thought  the example from Minimum Spanning Trees in R a... [Read more...]

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Huh… I didn’t realize just how similar rvest was to XML until I did a bit of digging. After my wonderful experience using dplyr and tidyr recently, I decided to revisit some of my old RUNNING code and see if it could use an upgrade by swapping out the ... [Read more...]

A big thanks to Gabriela de Quieroz for organizing the San Francisco R-ladies Meetup, where I spent a few hours yesterday introducing people to my census-related R packages. A special thanks to Sharethrough as well, for letting us use their space for the event. It was my first time running ... [Read more...]

In network analysis, blockmodels provide a simplified representation of a more complex relational structure. The basic idea is to assign each actor to a position and then depict the relationship between positions. In settings where relational dynamics are sufficiently routinized, the relationship between positions neatly summarizes the relationship between sets ... [Read more...]

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While working with some data in Hive recently using the Oracle R Connectors for Hadoop (ORCH), I tried to use the ore.make.names function (of package OREbase ). The function creates valid column names for ore.frame objects. Here is a reproducible example, copied straight from the function documentation: Experimenting ... [Read more...]

The latest update to Revolution R Open, RRO 3.2.0, is now available for download from MRAN. In addition to new features, this release tracks the version number of the underlying R engine version (so this is the release following RRO 8.0.3). Revolution R Open 3.2.0 includes: The latest R engine, R 3.2.0. This includes ... [Read more...]

At last week’s monthly meeting, the R foundation has decided to create a new mailing list in order to help R package authors in their package development and testing. [Read more...]

It is always fun to find trend in time series data. But what about the scenarios where the trend in the time series changes. Detecting the point of this trend change can be quite beneficial. For example, if you can immediately detect the change in revenue regime of a company ... [Read more...]

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A new released of BH is now on CRAN. BH provides a large part of the Boost C++ libraries as a set of template headers for use by R and Rcpp. This release both upgrades the version of Boost to the current release, and adds a new library: Boost MultiPr... [Read more...]

          Mmmmm, chartjunk! Rebooting Vega.jl Recently, I’ve found myself without a project to hack on, and I’ve always been interested in learning more about browser-based visualization. So I decided to revive the work that John Myles White had done in building Vega.jl nearly two years ago. And ... [Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert The 8th XLDB (Extremely Large Databases) Conference open at Stanford on Tuesday with an outstanding program. This conference has been providing leadership in the "Big Data" world since its first workshop which was held in 2007. For example, the summary report for that year notes: "Both communities (industry ... [Read more...]

IntroductionPolice in Britain (http://data.police.uk/) not only register every single crime they encounter, and include coordinates, but also distribute their data free on the web.They have two ways of distributing data: the first is through an API, which is extremely easy to use but returns only a ... [Read more...]