If you follow the stock market, you’ve probably heard the expression “Sell in May, Go Away.” This expression generally refers to the perceived idea that the stock market goes up between the end of October and end of April, but one should sell at the beginning of May to ...

There is an entertaining rumour going around about the journal Nature Communications. When I heard it for the fourth or fifth time, I decided to check out whether there is any truth in it. The rumour goes something like this: the impact factor of Nature Communications is driven by physical ...

Over a decade ago, Andrew Gelman and Jennifer Hill gave applied researchers a comprehensive book (Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models) on fitting simple and complex statistical models in R both from a classical framew...

It is always exciting to find an interesting pattern in the data that seems to point to some important difference or relationship. A while ago, one of my colleagues shared a figure with me that looked something like this: It looks like something is going on. On average low scorers ...

Two fairy different riddles on the weekend Riddler. The first one is (in fine) about Egyptian fractions: I understand the first one as Find the Egyptian fraction decomposition of 2 into 11 distinct unit fractions that maximises the smallest fraction. And which I cannot solve despite perusing this amazing webpage on Egyptian ...

(TL;DR: Dijkstra’s algorithm is correct. Mathematical proof inside

And she’s got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need. “I’m not absolutely certain of the facts, but I rather fancy it’s Shakespeare who says that it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced with ...

Following on the recent CRAN release of rTRNG, it’s time to show its features and usage more in detail. rTRNG is a new package for advanced parallel Random Number Generation in R. It relies on TRNG (Tina’s Random Number Generator), a state-of-t...

Following on the recent CRAN release of rTRNG, it’s time to show its features and usage more in detail. rTRNG is a new package for advanced parallel Random Number Generation in R. It relies on TRNG (Tina’s Random Number Generator), a state-...

Have you ever found a GitHub repository with an interesting R package? Probably yes. How cool would it be to try it out without having to deal with installation and dependencies? Fortunately, it is possible thanks to the BinderHub - the server technology that turns computational material (e.g. Jupyter ...

The latest version of the salesforcer package (v0.1.3) is now available on CRAN and it is ready to help you better manage your Salesforce data. Along with a host of bug fixes this release has three big features: Pull lists of deleted and updated records by timeframe and be able ...

Roland Stevenson is a data scientist and consultant who may be reached on Linkedin. reticulate is an R package that allows us to use Python modules from within RStudio. I recently found this functionality useful while trying to compare the results of different uplift models. Though I did have R’...

R users adore the ggplot2 package for all things data visualization. Its consistent syntax, useful defaults, and flexibility make it a fantastic tool for creating high-quality figures. Although ggplot2 is great, there are other dataviz tools that deserve a place in a data scientist’s toolbox. Enter plotly. plotly is ...

We’ve recently introduced CRAN checks on our blog: once on CRAN your package is checked regularly on a dozen platforms, and new failures can lead to its being archived or orphaned. We mentioned ways to monitor your CRAN checks results, including a cool web API, the CRAN checks API. ...