A new release, now at version 0.1.3, of pkgKitten arrived on CRAN this morning. The main change is (optional) support of the excellent whoami package by Gabor which allows us to fill in the Author: and Maintainer: fields of the DESCRIPTION file with ... [Read more...]

The R script below illustrates the nested versus non-nested (crossed) random effects functionality in the R packates lme4 and nlme. Note that crossed random effects are difficult to specify in the nlme framework. Thus, I've included a back-of-the-envelope (literally a scanned image of my scribble) interpretation of the 'trick' to ... [Read more...]

For a long time I tracked a discussion on LinkedIn that consisted of various opinions about using SAS vs R. Some people can take this very personal.  Recently there was an interesting post at the DataCamp blog addressing this topic. They also prov... [Read more...]

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R is now integrated with Apache Spark, the open-source cluster computing framework. The Databricks blog announced this week that yesterday's release of Spark 1.4 would include SparkR, "an R package that allows data scientists to analyze large datasets and interactively run jobs on them from the R shell". The SparkR 1.4 announcement ... [Read more...]

Paris Digital Humanities Workshop [Read more...]

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We saw this scatterplot with marginal densities the other day, in a blog post by Thomas Wiecki: The graph was produced in Python, using the seaborn package. Seaborn calls it a “jointplot;” it’s called a “scatterhist” in Matlab, apparently. The seaborn version also shows the strength of the linear ... [Read more...]

In part I of this post series on NBA game dynamics, I explored the average score differential that teams faced over the course of games. Interestingly, this proved to not be a very reliable proxy for overall performance and number of wins accrued over an entire season. To continue, I ... [Read more...]

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By Andrew Vodden, Account Manager   The Manchester R user group met last Tuesday in a temporary venue next to the Manchester Art Gallery in the city centre. We had a full house and were delighted to welcome representatives from … Continue reading → [Read more...]

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R’s data frames regularly create somewhat of a furor on public forums like Stack Overflow and Reddit. Starting R users often experience problems with the data frame in R and it doesn’t always seem to be straightforward. But does it really need to be so? Well, not necessarily. ... [Read more...]

Analysis of statistical algorithms can generate workloads that run for hours, if not days, tying up a single computer. Many statisticians and data scientists write complex simulations and statistical analysis using the R statistical computing environment. Often these programs have a very long run time. Given the amount of time ... [Read more...]

Probabilistic programming approach to understand regional trends in apartment prices in Finland [Read more...]

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In case you missed them, here are some articles from May of particular interest to R users. RStudio 0.99 released with improved autocomplete and data viewer features. A tutorial on the new Naive Bayes classifier in the RevoScaleR package. R is the most popular Predictive Analytics / Data Mining / Data Science software ... [Read more...]

Sometimes a bit of R code needs to know what operating system it’s running on. Here’s a short account of where you can find this information and a little function to wrap the answer up neatly. Operating systems are a platform issue, so let’s start with the ... [Read more...]