It has always been the mission of R developers to connect R to the “good stuff”. As John Chambers puts it in his book Extending R: One of the attractions of R has always been the ability to compute an interesting result quickly. A key motivation for the original S ...

I am going to cut right to the chase, since this is the third of three posts related to confounding and weighting, and it’s kind of a long one. (If you want to catch up, the first two are here and here.) My aim with these three posts is ...

Introduction On the 8th, 9th and 10th of December I participated at the IKEA hackaton. In one word it was just FANTASTIC! Well organized, good food, and participants from literally all over the world, even the heavy snow fall on … Continue reading →

    Hi all, This post deals with a strange phenomenon in R that I have noticed while working on unbiased MCMC. Reducing the problem to a simple form, consider the following code, which iteratively samples a vector ‘x’ and stores it in a row of a large matrix called ‘chain’ (I’...

More sites are turning to services like Cloudflare due to just how stupid-easy it is to DDoS a site. Sometimes the DDoS is intentional (malicious). Sometimes it’s because your bot didn’t play nice (stop that, btw). Sadly, at some point, most of us with “vital” sites are going ...

R is an incredible tool for reproducible research. In the present series of blog posts I want to show how one can easily acquire data within an R session, documenting every step in a fully reproducible way. There are numerous data acquisition options for R users. Of course, I do ...

It has been a while since my last post due to the major transition of moving back to Canada. This post will be a bit shorter than my previous ones but hopefully it will give some insight on practically investigating and analyzing open data that are becoming more popular these ...

There are important discussions nowadays about data modeling, to choose between the “two cultures” (as mentioned in Breiman (2001)), i.e. either econometrics models or machine/statistical learning models. We did discuss this issue recently in Econométrie et Machine Learning (so far only in French) with Emmanuel Flachaire and Antoine ...

R 3.4.3 (codename “Kite-Eating Tree”) was released last week. You can get the latest binaries version from here. (or the .tar.gz source code from here). As mentioned by David Smith, R 3.4.3 is primarily a bug-fix release: It fixes an issue with incorrect time zones on MacOS High Sierra, and some ...

Hi there! We just launched Working with Web Data in R by Oliver Keyes and Charlotte Wickham, our latest R course! Most of the useful data in the world, from economic data to news content to geographic information, lives somewhere on the internet – and this course will teach you how ...