A useful feature of R is its ability to implement a function differently depending on the ‘class’ of the object acted on. This article explores this behaviour with reference to a playful modification of the ‘generic’ function plot() to allow plotting of cartoon bicycles. Although the example is quite simple ... [Read more...]

Suppose you have a data frame with a number of columns. You want to put the Trader and System columns first but you also want to do this in a flexible way. One approach would be to specify column numbers. This does the job but it's not very flexible. After ... [Read more...]

UPDATE Since writing this post I’ve re-implemented the app as a dashboard. View the dashboard version, source code, and new blog post. Brief Summary I built an interactive, online App using Shiny where you can upload your own data (for an example, download mtcars) and perform basic clustering analysis ... [Read more...]

Sometimes we want to make our own heatmap using image() function. I recently found it's tricky to set the color option there, as its manual has very little information on col:cola list of colors such as that generated by rainbow, heat.colors,... [Read more...]

Today is my 11th wedding anniversary with my wonderful husband Jay, so it's a love-themed Friday post today. Jay and I met before Facebook was a thing, but we've been touched by the congratulations on our timelines today. Those timeline posts reveal a lot about you and your relationships, and ... [Read more...]

“First things first”. Tautological, always true. However, sometimes some data scientists seem to ignore this: you can think of using the most sophisticated and trendy algorithm, come up with brilliant ideas, imagine the most creative visualizations but, if you do not know … Continue reading → [Read more...]

R is coming to SQL Server. SQL Server 2016 (which will be in public preview this summer) will include new real-time analytics, automatic data encryption, and the ability to run R within the database itself: For deeper insights into data, SQL Server 2016 expands its scope beyond transaction processing, data warehousing and ... [Read more...]

Static MapsIn the last post I showed how to download economic data from the World Bank's website and create choropleth maps in R (Global Economic Maps).In this post I want to focus more on how to visualize those maps.Sp PackageProbably the simplest way... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

An interesting paper (Modelling the recent common ancestry of all living humans, Nature, 431, 562–566, 2004) by Rohde, Olson and Chang concludes with the words: Further work is needed to determine the effect of this common ancestry on patterns of genetic variation in structured populations. But to the extent that ancestry is considered ... [Read more...]

The data.tree package provides a facility to create and manage tree structures in R, and to decorate nodes with methods. This comes in handy for many algorithms. For an example, see here. Or read up the vignettes in the package, e.g. from CRAN. In the last post, I ... [Read more...]

This week I uploaded a new version of the forecast package to CRAN. As there were a lot of changes, I decided to increase the version number to 6.0. The changes are all outlined in the ChangeLog file as usual. I will highlight some of the more important changes since v5.0 ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]

by Joseph Rickert A strong case can be made that base R graphics supplemented with either the lattice library or ggplot2 for plotting by subgroups provides everything a statistician might need for both exploratory data analysis and for developing clear, crisp for communicating results. However, it is abundantly clear that ... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Computerworld's Sharon Machlis published today a very useful list of R packages that every R user should know. The list covers packages for data import, data wrangling, data visualization and package development, but for beginning R users the biggest challenge is usually just dealing with data. To that end, I ... [Read more...]

Predictive analytics often serves as an introduction to data science, but it may not be the best exemplar given its long history and origins in statistics. David Blei, on the other hand, struggles to define data science through his work on topic modeli... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

[Read more...]