Last week I blogged about the dutchmasters color palettes package, which was inspired by the wonderful ochRe package. As mentioned I shamelessly copied the package. I replaced the list with character vectors containing hex colors and did a find and replace to make it dutchmasters instead of ochRe. This was ...

There was a time when Web scraping was quite a difficult task requiring knowledge of XML Tree parsing and HTTP Requests. But with the likes of libraries like beautifulsoup (for Python) and rvest (for R), Web scraping has become a toy for any beginner to play with. This post aims ...

It’s been a long time coming, but swatches? is now on CRAN. What is “swatches”? First off, swatches has nothing to do with those faux-luxury brand Swiss-made timepieces. swatches is all about color. R/CRAN has plenty of color picking packages. The colourlovers? ? by @thosjleeper is one of my ...

The official guidelines for the M4 competition have now been published, and there have been several developments since my last post on this. There is now a prize for prediction interval accuracy using a scaled version of the Mean Interval Score. If...

Say what you will about 2017 - it sure made an impact. In the broader view I’m pretty sure all sensible people can agree that that impact was predominantly negative, but even so, small pockets of good can happen. So, here’s a short post about all (...

Two hundred thirty-seven new packages made it to CRAN in November. Here are my picks for the “Top 40” organized into the categories: Computational Methods, Data, Data Science, Science, Social Science, Utilities and Visualizations. Computational Methods CVXR v0.94-4: Implements an object-oriented modeling language for disciplined convex programming (DCP) which allows ...

A guide through the available drivers and tools when using Amazon Redshift from R and/or RStudio. We examine RPostgreSQL, RPostgres and RJDBC.

A try to automatize the data preparation discretization stage. Converting numerical variables into categorical to be used in real scenarios.

This post will be about investigating the efficacy of contango as a volatility trading signal. For those that trade volatility … Continue reading →

Machine Learning and Regression Machine Learning (ML) is a field of study that provides the capability to a Machine to understand data and to learn from the data. ML is not only about analytics modeling but it is end-to-end modeling that broadly involves following steps: – Defining problem statement – Data collection. – ...

Animating dot plots to demonstrate patient flow - Dots.. This is not the blog post I’d originally intended to write. But I’m glad - because this one is so much better. Some background. I’m one of the few Scotland based members of Ap...