Another Rblpapi release, now at version 0.3.8, arrived on CRAN yesterday. Rblpapi provides a direct interface between R and the Bloomberg Terminal via the C++ API provided by Bloomberg Labs (but note that a valid Bloomberg license and installation is... [Read more...]

A management challenge Between 2011 and 2017 I selected somewhere between 20 and 30 staff and contractors, for New Zealand public sector roles with titles like Analyst, Senior Analyst and Principal Analyst. Alternative names for these roles could have been (and sometimes were) “researcher”, “data analyst”, “statistician”, “R developer”, “data scientist” and in one ... [Read more...]

A management challenge Between 2011 and 2017 I selected somewhere between 20 and 30 staff and contractors, for New Zealand public sector roles with titles like Analyst, Senior Analyst and Principal Analyst. Alternative names for these roles could h... [Read more...]

A management challenge Between 2011 and 2017 I selected somewhere between 20 and 30 staff and contractors, for New Zealand public sector roles with titles like Analyst, Senior Analyst and Principal Analyst. Alternative names for these roles could h... [Read more...]

Making it even easier to download and organize stock prices from Yahoo Finance - I just released a long due update to package BatchGetSymbols. The files are under review in CRAN and you should get the update soon. Meanwhile, you c... [Read more...]

In war, truth is the first casualty (Aeschylus) I am not a pessimistic person. On the contrary, I always try to look at the bright side of life. I also believe that living conditions are now better than years ago as these plots show. But reducing the complexity of our ... [Read more...]

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I just released a long due update to package BatchGetSymbols. The files are under review in CRAN and you should get the update soon. Meanwhile, you can install the new version from Github:

if (!require(devtools)) install.packages('devtools')
devtools::install_github('msperlin/BatchGetSymbols')

The main innovations are: Clever cache system: By default, every new download of data will be ... [Read more...]

This is part 1 of a 3 part blog post. This post presents the Luxembourgish language as well as the literary work I am going to analyze using the R programming language. Part 2 deals with preparing the data for analysis, and finally part 3 is the analysis. Hope you enjoy! Luxembourg and the ... [Read more...]

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One of the great features of R is the possibility to quickly access web-services. While some companies have the habit and policy to document their APIs, there is still a large chunk of undocumented but great web-services that help the regular data scie... [Read more...]

Welcome to the fifteenth post in the rarely rational R rambling series, or R4 for short. There are two posts I have been meaning to get out for a bit, and hope to get to shortly---but in the meantime we are going start something else. Another longer-running idea I had ... [Read more...]

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In a recent sprint, I was faced with the problem of carrying out analysis on data extracted from a database where there were several instances of the same table type and I wanted to do the same tasks on each of them. I know enough about the tidyverse to realise ... [Read more...]

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The fifteenth release in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp landed on CRAN today after just a few days of gestation in incoming/. This release follows the 0.12.0 release from July 2016, the 0.12.1 release in September 2016, the 0.12.2 release in November 2016, the 0.12.3 release in January 2017, the 0.12.4 release in March 2016, the 0.12.5 release in May 2016, the 0.12.6 release ... [Read more...]

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