The recent r-project article “Use of C++ in Packages” stated as its own summary of recommendation: don’t use C++ to interface with R. A careful reading of the article exposes at least two possible meanings of this: Don’t use C++ to directly call R or directly manipulate R ... [Read more...]

For one of my projects I needed to download text from multiple websites. In this case, I used rvest and dplyr. Accessing the information you want can be relatively easy if the sources come from the same websites, but pretty tedious when the websites are heterogenous. The reason is how ... [Read more...]

Introduction From our earlier studies of UFO sightings, a recurring question has been the extent to which the frequency of sightings of inexplicable otherworldly phenomena depends on the population of an area. Intuitively: where there are more people to catch a glimpse of the unknown, there will be more reports... [Read more...]

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@ted_dunning recently updated the t-Digest algorithm he created back in 2013. What is this “t-digest”? Fundamentally, it is a probabilistic data structure for estimating any percentile of distributed/streaming data. Ted explains it quite elegantly in this short video: Said video has a full transcript as well. T-digests have been ... [Read more...]

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For many, R is the go-to language when it comes to data analysis and predictive analytics. However many data scientists are also expanding their use of R to include machine learning and deep learning. These are exciting new topics, and ODSC East — where thousands of data scientists will gather this ... [Read more...]

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This is about some academic work I did that never got published. But, I think it should be out there … More [Read more...]

A great part of my job as a bat ecologist is to classify bat species from their echolocation calls. I regularly use automatic recording devices that generate thousands of recordings per location. Dealing with this huge amount of information is not an easy task as you can imagine. In the ... [Read more...]

A few weeks ago we published a post about using the power of the evolutionary method for optimization (see Evolution works!). In this post we will go a step further, so read on… A problem researchers often face is that they have an amount of data and need to find ... [Read more...]

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With almost year passed since the previous 0.1.0 release, a nice new release of the tint package arrived on CRAN today. Its name expands from tint is not tufte as the package offers a fresher take on the Tufte-style for html and pdf presentations. Th... [Read more...]

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The richness and variety of packages for building and fitting statistical models in R is absolutely astonishing and contributes to the language’s popularity. However, this diversity makes it hard for developpers that want to create tools that wor... [Read more...]

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The richness and variety of packages for building and fitting statistical models in R is absolutely astonishing and contributes to the language’s popularity. However, this diversity makes it hard for developpers that want to create tools that work with different types of models. Indeed, the way to access models’ ... [Read more...]